Utwory na płycie:

• Tk 1 Astor Piazzolla La Muerte del Angel
• Tk 2 Astor Piazzolla Aconcagua Allegro marcato
• Tk 3 Astor Piazzolla Aconcagua Moderato
• Tk 4 Astor Piazzolla Aconcagua Presto
• Tk 5 Astor Piazzolla Romance del Diablo
• Tk 6 Astor Piazzolla Tanguedia
• Tk 7 Astor Piazzolla Milonga del Angel
• Tk 8 Astor Piazzolla Vayamos al Diablo
• Tk 9 Astor Piazzolla Tres Tangos Tango I Allegro tranquillo
• Tk 10 Astor Piazzolla Tres Tangos Tango II Moderato mistico
• Tk 11 Astor Piazzolla Tres Tangos Tango III Allegretto molto marcato
• Tk 12 Astor Piazzolla Oblivion

After Piazzolla’s death his agent and publisher, Aldo Pagani, decided to give the Bandoneón Concerto the more poetic appellation Aconcagua, possibly as a marketing ploy. ‘Aconcagua’ is the name of the highest peak in both Argentina and the Andes, and Pagani claimed to have chosen it as a title because he felt the concerto represented the creative summit of Piazzolla’s compositional achievements. Certainly the work’s three movements effectively summarise the most consistent aspects of Piazzolla’s mature style: the first draws heavily on the nationalistic idiom of his teacher Ginastera, notably in its use of excitingly propulsive rhythmic patterns inspired by the examples of Bartók and Stravinsky; the second is more reflective and closer in idiom to some of Piazzolla’s intimate chamber pieces; the concluding rondo is related in style to the composer’s energetic and percussive tango scores, and concludes in a burst of music from a pre-existing Piazzolla tango called Flaco Aroldi. To allow the soloist the maximum opportunity for effective projection, Piazzolla elected to eliminate all wind and brass instruments from the work’s orchestration

When Piazzolla recorded Aconcagua or performed it on concert tours, he liked to couple the concerto with another substantial work for bandoneón and orchestra, the Tres Tangos; both works were featured as part of the last concert of his career, given in Athens in July 1990. The ‘Three Tangos’ were first heard at the two televised stadium concerts given by Piazzolla in Buenos Aires in 1980, and at the time of their premiere engendered somewhat mixed feelings amongst listeners. Perceptive critics praised the composer for having effectively synthesised elements of the popular and ‘erudite’ (Piazzolla’s own term for his concert music), but those well versed in the traditional tango repertoire were perplexed by the apparent similarity between a theme in the second movement and a 1930s tango by Sebastián Piana, and some unfairly accused Piazzolla of plagiarism – a ridiculous charge given the fact that the composer’s style is steeped in gestures of homage to his tango ancestry, and an accusation by which he was deeply hurt.

The other works included in the present recording are representative of the more concentrated style Piazzolla achieved in his short pieces for tango quintet. The evocative Milonga del Angel (1965), written for a short film about the life of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, is one of several compositions to which Piazzolla gave the title milonga (a nineteenth-century dance, close in idiom to the tango, which evolved from a traditional gaucho song form). The piece belongs to a series of ‘Angel’ works, which also includes La Muerte del Angel (1962), a vigorous tango-fugue which is perhaps the finest example of Piazzolla’s skilful adaptation of neo-classical contrapuntal techniques to his own idiosyncratic ends. The ‘Angel’ series as a whole remains far better known than the parallel series of ‘Diablo’ pieces, which includes the daring Vayamos al Diablo (a curious work in 7 /4 time – a tango paradox), and the sensual Romance del Diablo (one of his very few works written in the major key): these first came to wider attention when performed and recorded by the Piazzolla Quintet at a rapturously received appearance in New York’s Philharmonic Hall in 1965. As guitarist Horacio Malvicino, one of Piazzolla’s closest friends and most loyal sidemen, once said of Romance del Diablo: ‘This is Astor!’ Piazzolla composed several pieces with the title Tanguedia (tango, tragedy and comedy) and the example on this disc dates from 1986: it is characterised by a pulsating and percussive rhythmic drive, and was used in the film El Exilio de Gardel, directed by Pino Solanas. The spirited groaning of the performers and effects such as the siren imitation on this track are fully in keeping with Piazzolla’s own performance practices, which often evoked the sounds of a dangerous Buenos Aires by night: when his band performed this score for the BBC in 1989, he punctuated the performance with dark enunciations of the word ‘quilombo’ (brothel). Oblivion is a popular extract from a score Piazzolla composed for the film version of Pirandello’s play Enrico IV (1984), directed by Marco Bellochio and starring Marcello Mastroianni.