selections from

Five Tango Sensations (1983-1989)

for bandoneon (or accordion) and string quartet

As Gertrude Stein might have said, a tango is a tango is a tango. But to Astor Piazzolla tango was not just dance music but a complete language capable of extension into any dimension, including concerto and opera. As a classically trained composer who had studied with Alberto Ginastera and Nadia Boulanger and as a virtuoso of the bandoneon who knew tango music from the inside, Piazzolla not only updated the idiom but also extended it far beyond the dance hall. His “nuevo tango” style might not have pleased the traditionalists of Buenos Aires but the concert pieces written under its influence are of such quality that they have fascinated musicians as distinguished and as diverse as Mstislav Rostropovich, Daniel Barenboim, Gidon Kremer and, more recently, Yo-Yo Ma.

The Five Tango Sensations were written in 1989 for The Kronos Quartet with whom the composer recorded the work, as bandoneon soloist, in one of his last studio session before he was incapacitated by illness. Although the Kronos Quartet had commissioned it, as a follow-up to Four, for Tango which Piazzolloa had written for the ensemble a couple of years earlier, it was not an entirely new score. In 1983 he had recorded Woe/Sette Sequenze with a string quartet drawn from the Graunke Orchestra in Munich and it was from that work that he arranged the Five Tango Sensations, discarding two movements and rescoring here and there. Even in its new identity it is still fairly woeful - always engagingly melodious but often deeply nostalgic.

The opening “sensation,” Asleep - which begins with a bandoneon (or accordion) soliloquy and features similarly eloquent violin and cello solos - is a characteristic example. The brooding second movement, Loving, is no more cheerful, in spite of a lighter touch in the comparatively animated pizzicato scoring of the middle section, and it ends in dissonant despair. The tango idiom is not much in evidence until the third movement, Anxiety, the stabbing rhythms of which are offset by expressive string solos. Despertar (or Waking Up) is not the lively episode one might expect from its title but the most reflective, or even regretful, movement of the five. Fear, on the other hand, is a brilliantly sustained tango fugue ending with an emphatic, or even triumphant, unison version of the main theme.