Astor Piazzolla: El Alma

Description

The phenomenon which most likely will characterize our era in the eyes of tomorrow’s historians is the onset of globalization. Within the space of little more than a century, there has been an exponential acceleration in the speed and availability of the means of transportation. Travelling around the globe has become almost normal for a vast majority of the inhabitants of the wealthy countries. Furthermore, communication technology has dramatically flattened the remaining distances. Today, a smartphone and an internet connection allow us to instantly connect with friends, relatives, or colleagues in any point of the globe. This has further caused the contamination and hybridization of our culture. The immediate availability of cultural products, artworks, or curiosities from virtually all cultures of the present and of the past creates omnivorous appetites, and the possibility of instantly satisfying them. “Fusion” is one of the keywords of today’s world, in food as in music, in clothing as in reading. The world has become a gigantic menu from which we can pick and choose whatever product encounters our taste. This has doubtlessly many advantages, but also some problematic elements. One of them is our increasing inability to contextualize a cultural product within the environment which produced it. For no man is an island; and society, language, culture, religion, politics etc., are fundamental components of an artist’s horizon. On the plus side, however, globalization has transferred to the whole world the enrichment coming from the encounter of cultures. If meeting somebody from a different culture has always brought an increase in knowledge and a broadening of horizons, this is now an experience available to all. From this viewpoint, the figure of Astor Piazzolla is one ahead of his time. And, indeed, during his lifetime Piazzolla had to struggle for recognition, whilst today’s globalized world increasingly appreciates his idiosyncratic figure and charism.
Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata on March 11th, 1921. He was the son of Italian emigrants. His father Vicente came from a family originally from Puglia; his mother, Assunta, came from a small Tuscan village. Poverty had driven the Piazzollas, along with countless other Italians, to the other side of the Atlantic. Many settled in the United States, whilst many more sought fortune in Latin America. Argentina, in particular, became a haven for the Italian emigrants: several Argentinian cities bear the name of Italian towns or villages, representing the touching tribute of the emigrants to their native lands; Italian, or Italian-sounding, words, have found their way in the particular form of Spanish spoken in Argentina. When Piazzolla was only four, however, his family moved to New York, where the boy grew up. There, he began to experience the lively musical culture of the American Roaring Twenties and of the Thirties. The legends of jazz played every night in the clubs of the metropolis, and Piazzolla did not miss his chance to listen to their performances. Already as a child, Astor had begun playing the bandoneon, one of the most typical instruments of Latin America; he was largely self-taught, but, at the same time, he learnt many technical and compositional skills from both Argentinian and US musicians. The real turning point of Piazzolla’s life, however, was his meeting with Carlos Gardel, the great singer and actor, who encouraged him in his musical efforts, and even invited him to participate in a tour. To Astor’s chagrin, his father forbade him to embark on such a tour; however, this choice was providential because Gardel died during the journey due to a plane accident. In 1937, the family went back to Mar del Plata. The boy, now 16 years old, had the possibility of knowing in depth the magic and the secrets of the tango, the quintessential musical expression of the Argentinian soul. However, by that time, he had been exposed to many other musical languages; in particular, to the sounds and rhythms of North American jazz music. He tried, therefore, to blend these two American languages, and to create his own style out of their encounter. This corresponded to the “truth” of his personality and of his own history: his musical perspective was born from the encounter of his Italian roots, of his Argentinian birth, and of his American upbringing. Yet, this was also seen as a betrayal of the “genuinely” Argentinian voice of the tango – to the point that his early efforts earned him the nickname of the asasino del tango. Indeed, Piazzolla himself was the first to acknowledge that his tango was not the same as that transmitted by tradition. He called his music nuevo tango, and proudly proposed it as a melting pot of the Argentinian tango, of the American jazz, but also of the culture of Western Classical music, from J. S. Bach to Stravinsky and to the pioneers of the avantgarde. If the Argentinians, who were the true specialists of traditional tango, failed at first to recognize the explosive innovation of Piazzolla’s nuevo tango, the Europeans were probably less attached to the quintessentially Argentinian tradition, and could see Piazzolla’s experiments with more detachment. And in fact, it was in Europe that he established his international reputation. Indeed, by a curious turn of the historical circumstances, it was precisely in Italy that Piazzolla obtained his first great successes. In particular, he established fruitful partnerships with some of the most important Italian musicians and singers of the era, including Milva and Mina, but also percussionist Tullio De Piscopo and bassist Pino Presti. With them, and others, he recorded in 1974 a legendary album, called Libertango after the most celebrated of its tracks. Libertango, a portmanteau from “libertad” and “tango”, is one of the most famous pieces by Piazzolla, and epitomizes the composer’s new idiom. The piece was recorded countless times afterwards, and has penetrated popular culture through films and commercials. In that 1974 album, another famous piece was found, i.e. Adios Nonino. This is one of the most autobiographical pieces ever written by the composer. He drafted it upon receiving the news of his father’s death. He was on tour, at the time, and probably found it difficult to forgive himself for not having been with his father. The family called Astor’s father nonino: this is one of the words which migrated from Italian to Argentinian Spanish. In Italian, “nonnino” (with a double N) is the affectionate form of “nonno”, grandfather; Astor’s children used to call their granddad nonino. The composer had already written a piece dedicated to his father, and had called it Nonino; he took the musical structure of Nonino and built on it his farewell, Adios, to his father. This creative action was cathartic: the composer had fallen into depression at his father’s death, in conjunction with the failure of the tour, and music helped him to overcome the sadness of mourning. Another special dedication is that of Escualo, a piece dedicated to one of the performers of this Da Vinci Classics album. It is the legendary violinist Fernando Suárez Paz, born in Ramos Mejía in 1941, who passed away in 2020. His great talent allowed him to enter the ranks of the Symphonic Orchestra of the LRA Radio del Estado while still in his teens; later, he would play in the two major orchestras of Argentina, i.e. the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional and the Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires. In spite of his classical education and his activity as a classical violinist, Suárez Paz was also a specialist of tango, playing in numerous tango orchestras and also in smaller ensembles. In particular, in 1978 he was noticed by Piazzolla, who invited him to join the Quinteto Nuevo Tango. For ten years, they toured together all over the world; Suárez Paz had become Piazzolla’s reference violinist, and also a very good friend. In 1991, the violinist played the solo part of Piazzolla’s Concierto de Nácar, and in the same year he recorded an album dedicated to Piazzolla. After the composer’s death, he would keep playing his music and promoting it with devotion and with unequalled expressivity: in the 1996 he founded a quintet for this particular purpose.The quintet, indeed, was one of Piazzolla’s favorite instrumental combinations: for it, he composed the Concierto para Quinteto, one of his masterpieces in its skillful handling of the received forms of classical composition and of the innovative and personal style of Piazzolla’s music. The work was premiered in 1971 by the Quinteto Nuevo Tango, and it embodies the composer’s fully developed personality. Among the other pieces recorded here, the two movements from the Estaciones Porteñas deserve special mention. The four works composing the collection were originally conceived separately, and were later combined by Piazzolla into a suite, reminiscent of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The pieces depict the various feelings and atmospheres of the four seasons of Buenos Aires: given the austral hemisphere, they have contrasting characteristics with respect to those of the European Vivaldi! Another Italian was the inspirer of Oblivion, originally written for the soundtrack of Marco Bellocchio’s Enrico IV; it is one of Piazzolla’s most touching compositions, with its hypnotic atmospheres and colors. The Milonga del Ángel (1962) belongs in a small suite dedicated to an “angel”; the triptych would be later expanded to include the Angel’s “Resurrection”, in 1965. Milongas are a genre of Latin-American music, which developed in the 1870s and constitutes one of the roots of Piazzolla’s own idiom. This piece lends its name to a 1993 album in which also Escualo and Biyuya are found. By way of contrast, no real “angel”, and no Italian lie behind Michelangelo ’70. The piece, in fact, is no homage to angels, or to the Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti: rather, it refers to a nightclub in Buenos Aires, where the composer used to play. It is a piece with an almost minimalist build-up, which reveals the fecund fantasy of the composer in employing skillfully an essential musical material. Together, these pieces represent a unique insight in the world of Piazzolla as a composer and as a performer, since he transmitted the true essence of his music to his most faithful collaborators, among whom Suárez Paz certainly has pride of place.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2022