Three Preludes

Leijia’s Game (tango prelude)

Flora’s Game (milonga prelude)

Sunny’s Game (waltz prelude)

A pupil of Alberto Ginastera, Astor Piazzolla became even more famous than his teacher, in Argentina and everywhere else, by developing the tango into a serious art form. In so doing he made himself a cult figure for creative artists as different as Pablo Neruda and John Adams and musicians as distinguished as Daniel Barenboim and Gidon Kremer. Although he lost count of his songs and his pieces for his own instrument, the bandoneon, he wrote comparatively little for the piano. The Three Preludes are among the most important. Modelled to some extent on Gershwin’s Three Preludes but influenced also by the jazz piano composers of his own and the intervening generation, they are speculative in their harmonies and essentially improvisatory in style. The first of them, Leijia’s Game, makes a particularly oblique approach to the tango and never gets to grips with the familiar dance rhythm. Flora’s Game develops material from the first Prelude and crystallises it into a tango-milonga before extending it into a dramatically expressive middle section and finally returning to the opening material. Sunny’s Game is surely, in its slow waltz rhythm and its sentimental line, a memory of the time Piazzolla spent in Paris as a student of Nadia Boulanger but also, it seems, as a devotee of the café-concert.

Just who Leijia, Flora and Sunny are, incidentally, we do not know but, bearing in mind Neruda’s description of Piazzolla’s music - “the flawed confusion of human beings… impregnated with sweat and smoke…as impure as old clothes, as a body, with its foodstains and its shame” - perhaps we do not want to know.