VA - Astor Piazzolla: Las Estaciones del Ángel (Adventures of a Double-Bass in Buenos Aires) (2021)

The Tango as an exercise in freedom
The cooperation between composers and instrumentalists originated, throughout history, some of the most memorable works in the chamber music and solo repertoire. In many cases, the composer’s acquaintance with a particular performer represented a true stimulus; but in an equal number of cases, it was the performer’s desire to broaden his or her repertoire that generated new expressive possibilities, while enriching the instrument’s sound resources.
The evolution of musical writing for the double bass had a turning point at a precise historical moment, when gestures grew broader, the sign’s tension augmented and extended itself, up to the proposal of a musical action which would erupt in an unbridled fin de siècle.
Berlioz had revolutionized the orchestra; within a short time, he would publish his Treatise on orchestration, later revised by Richard Strauss. In the meantime, Verdi was composing his Trilogy – Rigoletto, Trovatore and La Traviata. Wagner was beginning to write his own Tetralogy, to be followed by Tristan und Isolde. Liszt was composing his B-minor Sonata. Vincent Van Gogh was born, shortly after Renoir and Monet. Flaubert was issuing Madame Bovary, whilst Victor Hugo published The Punishments and, shortly afterwards, The Miserables. Charles Darwin issued in printing The Origin of Species.
The contribution given by Giovanni Bottesini was incommensurable. He gave an answer to the peremptory need to bring his instrument on a par, on the same level of other concert instruments, even though his essential role only seldom encouraged other composers to broaden the double bass’ repertoire.
When Enrico Fagone shared with me the idea of creating a version for double bass and strings of Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas, I felt a great joy. Earlier on, I had written a version for cellist Enrico Dindo, but the possibility of realizing a work with a wide gesturalness for this instrument enthused me. The double bass’ sound territories and its expressive possibilities have been seldom trodden, in comparison with other regions of the musical universe.
Astor Piazzolla himself was attracted by that instrument, that had been confined, up to that time, to the rhythmic section. Kicho and Contrabajísimo delve into the heavenly abysses of secular memories embraced by an overwhelming and jaunty urbanity. The double bass acquired the leading role that had hitherto been precluded to it, together with a lyricism equal to that of the bandoneon and of the violin.
The composer who had been born in Mar del Plata reinvented the sound of the city, and Buenos Aires became the amphitheatre of a different expression.
The tango was created in Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century, as a typically urban and metropolitan experience. From its lines and poetics, a perennial nostalgia arose. The Latin-American metropolis underwent a dizzying transformation at the end of the nineteenth century. Buenos Aires was opening itself to the world, welcoming an important socio-cultural flow, a rich and dynamic one. The tango was therefore the witness of the feverish metamorphosis of a city in full evolution.
The Porteña music’s perennial nostalgia reveals itself almost as a symbol for the resistance to the laceration of a collective memory facing the capital city’s inevitable development. The exercise in memory happening in tango became a metaphor for the impossibility of detaining in the present what is flowing from one’s hands. Before Piazzolla, the tango used to sing the past, with images which lasted in time, and whose nature allowed one to experience them among the silences of their memory.
Piazzolla’s music is the aural transposition of time present. Buenos Aires Hora Cero represents his night, rather than a possible picture of a dusk in the city. Its ghosts, its obscurity. Tres Minutos con la Realidad is a slap, throwing us toward our own “day after day”. His epic is severe and rigid, pierced by a ferocious minimalism – Michelangelo 70, at Central Park, New York, in the year 1987.
A picture taken in 1935 is replenished with a posthumous irony. It portrays Piazzolla as a child and Carlos Gardel at the peak of his career. Those times are far away. The most important voice in the tango world went to the US to shoot a film, which would become the last in his life. An immense space separates El día que me quieras from Vuelvo al Sur:

Caress my dream
the gentle murmuring of your sighing.
How Life smiles
if your black eyes look at me!
(El día que me quieras)

Words surface, enclosed within one of the most beautiful melodies in the entire repertoire. A watchperson for symbols, geometries of the Word. A song of love, an archaic gesture bringing with it nothing new under the greeting of the Sun God, just as in the case of Mallarmé’s timeless blue.
Years later, the fellowship between Horacio Ferrer and Piazzolla would lead toward a new aesthetics, which will open up the fortresses of an overflowing urban metaphysics. Surrealism, symbolism and Parnassianism melt into an uncommon urban flow, coloured by a lunfardo language among those populating Buenos Aires’ night life. “Both Piazzolla and I created a new language within the aesthetics of the tango”, said once Ferrer to me. At the end, fifty years after photography, tango became a metaphor in the famous tango Vuelvo al Sur by Piazzolla and Pino Solanas. South is a symbol. South is always subjective. South is a metaphor. It is the representation of an idea, and as such it remains.
Piazzolla and Ferrer had deep roots within the music of Buenos Aires. Both grew up in the womb of the tango’s poetic ark. Both managed – in spite of the anxiety provoked by the vertigo of freedom – to express the radical changes surrounding them. Their past and their thirst for a time present generated such an implosion that their energy was projected, until it recreated and nourished the new and current image of the tango. Horizons widened. The opening of the tango’s boundaries extended itself so that its nature was transformed, while its identity was preserved. The tango used to be a purely national phenomenon, whereby a quintessentially Porteño drama was narrated in a naked and bare fashion. Their greatest and most fecund heritage was to have allowed the tango to become a fertile space for an encounter, where poetics of a varied nature could coincide and shape a vigorous aesthetic experience.
“Tango after tango” became an exercise in freedom!
The artists represented in this album, including the famous pianist Martha Argerich, the Oscar-winning musician Luis Bacalov, the violinist of Piazzolla’s legendary quintet, Fernando Suárez Paz, and bandoneonist Néstor Marconi, represent an example of how the tango has been crossed by the multiplicity of shared experiences. Enrico Fagone has been able to gather artists from diverse sound worlds, with the implicit wish to celebrate the living matter that the tango still is.
“The tango has a halo of mystery”, Horacio Ferrer once whispered to me. And the sprite of his María de Buenos Aires accompanies us in our pilgrimage, as an everlasting guardian, constantly able to give us a dream, and to remind us – once and a thousand times – that tango has the miraculous capability of seeming lifeless, later to be reborn, in order to mock those who thought it was extinct.