Astor Piazzolla & Kronos Quartet – Five Tango Sensations

Dedicado ao lindo amor de Bird & Velvet Goldmine...

“Does tango have any true relevance today? The answer must be assuredly, vehemently in the affirmative. At its creative and emotional best, tango is more than its own clichés perpetuated in pap arrangements. To a considerable degree, it is Astor Piazolla who is responsible for ensuring tango’s continued growth.
More than a dance revisiting its sensuous past, tango is the pulse of a society. Like Algerian rai, Portuguese fado, Greek rembetika, and American blues, it taps into the wellspring of a sub-culture. Invoking those familiar and perhaps not-so-familiar names is more than specious intellectualism or a case of clutching at the handy straws of comparison, for tango too was born to a demimonde culture. It too was the music of the urban disadvantaged. It too was the music of rebellion for a sub-class frowned upon, in its case, by Argentinian high society – unless its socialites decided to go slumming so divinely.
Tango did not lose its voice when its great star Carlos Gardel died in 1935, even if they say a nation went into mourning. Tango was a living tradition and a music of survival; nonetheless it still came perilously close to decline. Tango survived, found new voices and Piazolla was one of those new voices. At the time of Gardel’s death Piazolla was a teenager living in New York, yet he had already successfully auditioned for the maestro and had already been recognized as being someone to watch.
Piazolla brought to tango influences as diverse as jazz, contemporary classicism and Italian opera, out of which he distilled Nuevo tango (‘New Tango’). And while the tango of the cryonic chamber slept on, his music sang a more urgent, radical song. His song did not always please. It challenged. It aroused passions. It communicated duende, that spirit of inspiration of which Federico Garcia Lorca spoke so persuasively, and like duende, it communicated danger, in Piazzolla’s case, not just of the figurative sort. His life was threatened, his music decried by people whose complacency was unsettled by such rampant innovation and studied disregard for the conventional. But in time Piazolla was recognized as one of tango’s inspirational voices, as inspirational a figure in music as his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges was in literature. That is a measure of Astor Piazzolla’s greatness.
Five Tango Sensations is the composer’s second piece for the Kronos Quartet. His first, Four, For Tango, came about after seeing the group play in New York City; eventually they would interpret it on their 1988 Nonesuch album Winter Was Hard.
The bandoneon that Piazzolla plays, he has remarked, was born in a church in Germany and moved on to the Prostibulos – the brothels of Argentina. Tango began in the whorehouses of Argentina and moved on to the world’s concert halls. That inversion packs an irony as cutting as razorwire.” Ken Hunt, November 1990.

Kronos Quartet:

David Harrington, violin
John Sherba, violin
Hank Dutt, viola
Joan Jeanrenaud, cello
Astor Piazolla, bandoneon

Faixas:

01. Asleep 05:23
02. Loving 06:10
03. Anxiety 04:51
04. Despertar 06:03
05. Fear 04:00

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