The musicians of the SPCO created this mashup of two great Argentinian composers’ music specifically for the 3rd Annual Musician Appreciation Concert. The combination of two contrasting tangos by Astor Piazzolla, framed by the opening and closing of Alberto Ginastera’s  Variaciones  Concertantes, is meant to showcase the talents of our members, individually and collectively, with some good humor thrown in.   

Ginastera’s work is a set of variations which each feature different solo instruments of the chamber orchestra. We draw upon our 2017 live video recording, and two of the most memorable solos from that concert. Cellist Julie Albers and harpist Tori Drake open the piece with a theme of great nobility, poise and grace.   

Nobility gives way to nostalgia as we break away from the concert hall to listen to a virtual at-home collaboration of SPCO strings and winds performing Piazzolla’s Oblivion, written in 1982. It is a slow tango, recalling the milonga, a song genre of Uruguay and Argentina that was a forerunner of the tango. The sultry solos, played alternately by oboe, clarinet, flute and trumpet, ride gently on the hypnotic, rhythmic undercurrent laid down by the strings.   

SPCO violinist Maureen Nelson describes the next tango: 

"Originally for flute and guitar, Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango, has often been transcribed for other instruments. Here we present the first piece, Bordello 1900, on violin and marimba (played with my husband, Matt McClung). There is plenty of subtle and graceful interplay between the performers, meant to reflect the saucy and flirtatious dance. The piece works best if one of the two players wears a red dress. We flipped a coin and Matt lost. "

After our diversion into the tango world of Piazzolla, bassist Zachary Cohen brings us back to the Concert Hall and infuses the reprise of Ginastera’s theme with great passion. While the cello solo ended with a whisper in its highest register, the bass ends with a low rumble that ushers in the full orchestra for a lively and rousing coda.   

© Kyu-Young Kim

Kyu-Young Kim ©2021

Astor Piazzolla, the last great Tango composer, was at the peak of his creativity when a stroke killed him in 1992. He left us, in the words of the old tango, "without saying goodbye," and that day the musical face of Buenos Aires was abruptly frozen. The creation of that face had started a hundred years earlier from the unlikely combination of African rhythms underlying gauchos' couplets, sung in the style of Sicilian canzonettas over an accompanying Andalucian guitar. As the years passed all converged towards the bandoneon: a small accordion-like instrument without keyboard that was invented in Germany in the 19th century to serve as a portable church organ and which, after finding its true home in the bordellos of Buenos Aires' slums in the 1920s, went back to Europe to conquer Paris' high society in the 1930s. Since then, it reigned as the essential instrument for any Tango ensemble.

Piazzolla's bandoneon was able to condense all the symbols of tango. The eroticism of legs and torsos in the dance was reduced to the intricate patterns of his virtuoso fingers (a simple C major scale in the bandoneon zigzags so much as to leave an inexperienced player's fingers tangled). The melancholy of the singer's voice was transposed to the breathing of the bandoneon's continuous opening and closing. The macho attitude of the tangueros was reflected in his pose on stage: standing upright, chest forward, right leg on a stool, the bandoneon on top of it, being by turns raised, battered, caressed.

I composed Last Round in 1996, prompted by Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman. They heard a sketch of the second movement, which I had written in 1991 upon hearing the news of Piazzolla's stroke, and encouraged me to finish it and write another movement to complement it. The title is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar, the metaphor for an imaginary chance for Piazzolla's spirit to fight one more time (he used to get into fistfights throughout his life). The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneon. The first movement represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh (it is actually a fantasy over the refrain of the song My Beloved Buenos Aires, composed by the legendary Carlos Gardel in the 1930s). But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other, separated by the focal bass, with violins and violas standing up as in the traditional tango orchestras. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.

Osvaldo Golijov ©1996