Piazzólla: Fuga y Misterio

Berlin meets Buenos Aires and it takes five to tango as the Artemis Quartet takes to the floor with Chilean pianist Jacques Ammon for a programme of works by Argentinian legend Astor Piazzolla.

It is perhaps no surprise that Crescendo magazine, reviewing the Artemis Quartet’s recent Virgin Classics CD of Schubert’s C major Quintet with Truls Mørk, said that the performance “could not be highly enough praised“. Perhaps more unexpected is that the Berlin-based string quartet has now joined forces with the Chilean pianist Jacques Ammon for a programme of music by Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992), the Argentinian master of the tango.

Eckart Runge, the Artemis‘ cellist, has in fact been collaborating with Ammon over the past decade to create celloproject, a duo playing the music of Piazzolla, his predecessor Carlos Gardel, and composers from the worlds of jazz (such as Chick Corea) and film (such as Charlie Chaplin and Nino Rota). As Runge says: "In the mid-1980s, when I first heard the music of Astor Piazzolla, little known in Europe at the time ... it was like being struck by lightning. With its almost cruelly shattering immediacy -- reminiscent of Schubert, somewhere between dream-like beauty and deathly sadness – and a refined subtlety between joy and tears, reminiscent of Chaplin, it moved me deeply. Only some years later did I dare to play this music for myself for the first time. Immediately I began to do my best to bring together everything I could find out about this music and its history, and consequently visited Buenos Aires.“

Although tango is understood as a ’popular‘ rather than classical genre, Piazzolla studied with the famed composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and his musical collaborators over the years included figures from jazz and popular music – for instance the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, the vibraphone player Gary Burton and the Italian chanteuse Milva – and classical musicians such as Salvatore Accardo, Mstislav Rostropovitsch and the Kronos Quartet. His output includes orchestral works, an opera and an oratorio. Perhaps his best-known work features on this disc, the Estaciones Porteñas (Seasons in Buenos Aires), inspired by Vivaldi’s Quattro stagioni and here performed by a piano trio.

Runge explains: “The idea of the Piazzolla Project was to bring the authentic sonic and expressive palette of the tango to life with the inexhaustible possibilities of the string quartet, the piano trio and the piano quintet. Sometimes melting into the melancholy tones of the bandoneon, sometimes breaking out into the raw heterogeneity of the tango quintet, it represented a completely new encounter with sound, rhythm, style and gesture. It was a pleasure for me to share with my quartet colleagues the experience I had gathered over the years in my engagement with this culture. They were enthused by the depth and variety of the tango. For all of us, this music was a great inspiration and it exercised an enriching influence on our involvement with the classical chamber repertoire.”

Who knew that the solid, staid old Berlin Philharmonic had such a groovy group of swingers in its cello section? One of them plays the maracas during the rests in his part, others slap their instruments with abandon, and some of them even shout at appropriate moments: if this makes them sound like trainspotters letting their hair down, it's not meant to. This recording of South American and South American-inspired music is full of joy from beginning to end, and played with the kind of accuracy other ensembles only dream of. The mood ranges from sultry and sweaty (Kaiser-Lindemann's Brazilian Variations) through coolly intellectual (the Fugue from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1) to pure sunshine (Burt Bacharach's "South American Getaway"). The arrangements are models of their kind, and the cellists respond to their challenges with bravura and passion--at times creating sounds remarkably like a bandonéon, at others producing perfect harmonics in octaves or just singing out with pure joy. Irresistibly seductive.

The king of dances, the tango, played by Eckart Runge and Jacques Ammon. There are performances of popular repertoire works such as “El Choclo” by Angel Villoldo and “El dia que me quieras” by Carlos Gardel. With technical brilliance, classical dance rhythms interact with the occasionally off-the-wall, sometimes fugue-like elements of tango nuevo.

Astor Piazzolla revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed “Tango Neuvo”, incorporating elements of Classical music and Jazz. At first his “Tango Neuvo” was met with resistance but after composing a number of successful tangos, his “Tango Nuevo” gradually gained acceptance both in Argentina and in Europe and North America.

The composer Markus Horn adopted the style of “Tango Nuevo” for this recording with the Duo Villarceaux, composing in the spirit of the great Argentinian composer as well as including some of the famous Piazzolla tangos. The result is a highly varied and coloured programme exhibiting virtuosic and evocative South-American flair from the two young pianists.