World Premiere: April 4, 2025
Last HSO Performance: Labro: World Premiere; Piazzolla: April 10, 2011
Instrumentation: Solo accordion, Solo Bandoneon, 2 flutes with 2nd doubling piccolo, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, harp and strings.
Duration: 32 minutes
The greatest master of the modern tango was Astor Piazzolla, born in Mar Del Plata, Argentina, a resort town south of Buenos Aires, on March 11, 1921, and raised in New York City, where he lived with his father from 1924 to 1937. Before Astor was ten years old, his musical talents had been discovered by Carlos Gardel, then the most famous of all performers and composers of tangos and a cultural hero in Argentina. At Gardel’s urging, the young Astor moved to Buenos Aires in 1937, and joined the popular tango orchestra of Anibal Troilo as arranger and bandoneón player. Piazzolla studied classical composition with Alberto Ginastera in Buenos Aires, and in 1954 he wrote a symphony for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic that earned him a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the renowned teacher of Copland, Thomson, Carter and many other of America’s most-gifted composers. Boulanger, as was her method, grounded Piazzolla in the classical European repertory, but then encouraged him to follow his genius for the tango rather than write in the traditional concert genres.
When Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1956, he founded his own performing group and began to create a modern style for the tango that combined elements of traditional tango, Argentinean folk music and contemporary classical, jazz and popular techniques into a “Nuevo Tango” that was as suitable for the concert hall as for the dance floor. He was sharply criticized at first by government officials and advocates of the traditional tango alike for his path-breaking creations. “Traditional tango listeners hated me,” he recalled. “I introduced fugues, counterpoint and other irreverences: people thought I was crazy. All the tango critics and radio stations of Buenos Aires called me a clown, they said my music was ‘paranoiac.’ And they made me popular. The young people who had lost interest in the tango started listening to me. It was a war of one against all, but in ten years, the war was won.” In 1974, Piazzolla settled again in Paris, winning innumerable enthusiasts for both his Nuevo Tango and for the traditional tango with his many appearances, recordings and compositions. By the time he returned to Buenos Aires in 1985, he was regarded as the musician who had revitalized one of the quintessential genres of Latin music, and he received awards from Down Beat and other international music magazines and from the city of Buenos Aires, as well as a Grammy nomination for his composition Oblivion. Piazzolla continued to tour widely, record frequently, and compose incessantly until he suffered a stroke in Paris in August 1990. He died in Buenos Aires on July 5, 1992.
Astor Piazzolla realized his electrifying blend of the fire and passion of the traditional tango with the vast expressive resources of modern harmony, texture and sonority in some 750 widely varied works that explore the genre’s remarkable expressive range, from violent to sensual, from witty to melancholy, from intimate to theatrical. Among his most ambitious concert works is Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (“The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”), published originally for piano solo in 1968 and later arranged for his own ensemble (he often used one of the movements to open his concerts) and for strings and piano. The four movements, beginning with Spring, are not specifically pictorial, as are Vivaldi’s well-known precedents, but are instead general evocations of the changing seasons in Piazzolla’s native Argentina.