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5.0 out of 5 stars

A superb centenary tribute to the great tango master

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2021

Just as the nocturne and the mazurka are synonymous with Chopin, the tango instantly brings to mind the name of Astor Piazzolla, whose centenary is being celebrated by this vibrant album titled simply Cien Años. Not many major composers adopted the tango (Stravinsky’s version in L’histoire du Soldat is so cool and detached it betrays the very nature of tango). It speaks volumes about the remoteness of South America from the minds of classical composers that the dumka and polonaise drew immense attention by comparison.

But once Piazzolla was discovered outside Argentina, no one has attracted more affection from a wide range of classical performers. The eroticism so dominant in tango dance programs doesn’t often seep through when Piazzolla makes it to Carnegie Hall, but he has so much to offer melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically that Eros is a side issue. No popular dance form besides the Viennese waltz has been as lucky in the sophistication that one genius brought to it. Piazzolla’s signature is indelible, and his music survives a wealth of arrangements and “derangements” (to borrow Thomas Beecham’s witty term) without losing its essence.

For all that, Piazzolla’s tangos have perhaps been passed from hand to hand too much for their own good, outside Argentina at least. Their foster homes in the U.S. and Europe haven’t always been congenial, which makes this new release stand out for sounding and feeling like the real thing. Piazzolla’s instrument was the bandoneon, and it occupies center stage on the program, played with undeniable charisma by Juanjo Mosalini, a recognized master of the instrument who was born in Buenos Aires in 1972 and whose career has an international reach.

In Western folk and popular music there are many varieties of bellows-driven reed instruments, each with its own character. The tango, to my ears, is inconceivable on Lawrence Welk’s accordion. Like the harmonica, the bandoneon is intimate and personal, but the harmonica in erotic mode is fairly laughable. The bandoneon has its own come-hither allure, and it can weave a melody as sinuously as the bodies of impassioned tango dancers. Piazzolla studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and he created Nuevo tango as a malleable genre that fluidly crosses over between the concert hall and the dockside bars and clubs of Buenos Aires.

A beautiful aspect of Mosalini’s playing is his ability to inhabit every world Piazzolla’s music takes us to, from the swanky to the gritty. The most urbane work here is the Concerto for Bandoneón, often just called Aconcagua. The music is relatively refined, the earthiness and growl of the bandoneon tempered for civilized purposes. But tango is still palpable, as explained in the readable and helpful program notes: “Many of Piazzolla’s compositions begin with a riff, a jagged theme that repeats insistently. Most of them have an air of milonga, the ancestral music of Buenos Aires.” As related to the bandoneon concerto, “the underlying pulse undulates in groups of 3, 3, and 2 right from the opening statement.”

This off-balance rhythm gives tango its signature, and in the most famous work here, The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, Piazzolla puts the basic rhythmic pulse through endless, fascinating changes, greatly aided by Mosalini’s arrangement for bandoneon and chamber orchestra—he adds punch to the accents and imbues the music with touches of his own personality. There are other arrangements by him on the disc, listed as world premieres, the most dazzling being an original composition, Tomá, Tocá, a bravura variant of a toccata in which he plays a Moto perpetuo in sixteenth notes while the tango melody is punched out as if by a third hand. Another of his pieces, Cien Años, the album’s title work, is tenderly reminiscent of smoky Parisian cafés at midnight, nodding to that strain of Piazzolla’s imagination.

As remarkable as Mosalini is, such an imaginative release owes just as much to , Gisèle Ben-Dor, the emeritus conductor of the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston. Not only does she lead each piece with sympathy and a knowing hand, keeping the tango pulse alive and vibrant, but Ben-Dor commissioned Mosalini’s Cien Años and his arrangement of The Four Seasons. The latter alone is enough to make this release a significant addition to the burgeoning Piazzolla discography, given is originality and its inspired take on the original. All lovers of Piazzolla will be grateful to Ben-Dor for a project that has wound up being a superb listen.

Warmly recommended as one of the liveliest, most entertaining albums of the year.

Huntley Dent

Another composer whose centenary occurs in 2016 is Alberto Ginastera, probably the most important musical voice of Argentina in the Twentieth century.
The Warner label pays him homage with an album titled “The Vocal Album” , entrusted ,with very good judgment, to one of those American orchestras who are professional through and through but little favored by the promotional glamour: California’s Santa Barbara Symphony, under the baton of its conductor laureate Gisele Ben-Dor, of Uruguayan origins.

But if the album is titled “The Vocal Album”, it is because the protagonist is the voice: that of the Puerto Rican soprano Ana Maria Martinez in the Five Argentine Popular Songs Op 10 and the cantata Milena Op 37, and, above all, that of the great Placido Domingo, who returns to his tenor tessitura to leave a lasting testimony of recognition to Ginastera, recording, next to Argentine Virginia Tola, two scenes as a duo of what was his opera debut in New York :” Don Rodrigo, ” Op. 31. Domingo participated in the world premiere of the opera as a very young man, and now, at the end of his career, remembers that moment.

CD of the week

Alberto Ginastera was born 100 years ago in Buenos Aires, on April 11, 1916. The conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor spent 15 years on the realization of the “The Vocal Album” project. She asked composer Shimon Cohen to orchestrate Ginastera’s “Canciones Populares Argentinas” and also brought Plácido Domingo on board, who famously started his world career in 1966 with his unforgettable title role performance in Ginastera’s opera “Don Rodrigo” in New York. Ursula Magnes treated herself to the wide spectrum of Ginastera’s music.

The compilation of the CD is wisely chosen. The listener is immediately taken by Ginastera’s popular folkloric and Argentine songs.  Particularly since this is the first time they have been performed by an orchestra. Puerto Rican singer Ana Maria Martínez shapes these energetic true-to-life songs in a fluent and natural fashion.

As Plácido Domingo impressively demonstrates, Ginastera was also capable of creating a very different mood reminiscent of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck”. Five years ago he went to a Los Angeles studio to resurrect and build on his 1966 breakthrough. This was his heart’s desire. The orchestral accompaniment by the Santa Barbara Symphony is intense and gripping.

With the cantata “Milena”, the text arranged by Ginastera himself from letters of Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, we get yet to experience a completely different side of Ginastera. To achieve this high degree of expressiveness, Ginastera crawls into Kafka’s angst-ridden world, acknowledging that “one can imagine this music accompanying a woman in her loneliness during the last faint twilight of her own life – and of the old social order – as she reads the letters from her deceased lover again and again.” A woman, the Argentinean soprano Virginia Tola, takes on Kafka’s interior monologue. It is no coincidence that Ginastera invokes the “Leiermann” from Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise”.

The composer died in 1983 in Geneva. This CD allowed me to discover his music with moments of pleasure, passion, and offered many eye-opening experiences.

19 May 2016
Hypnotizing Mastery

An anniversary album in honor of the legendary Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s (1916-1983) 100th birthday: Plácido Domingo, celebrating his own 75th birthday this year, is first in line to salute the composer who started his career. After all, it was the US premiere of Ginastera’s opera “Don Rodrigo” at the New York City Opera in 1966 that brought the Spanish tenor his first triumph. Naturally, excerpts from “Don Rodrigo” found their way onto this album (the lovers’ duet “Fortuna …” and the final church scene). Especially the epoch-making “Cinco Canciones Populares Argentinas” and the cantata “Milena” op. 37 (based on Kafka), as performed by Domingo, his Operalia discoveries Ana María Martínez and Virginia Tola and the Santa Barbara Symphony (expertly conducted by Gisèle Ben-Dor), highlight the South American flavor and originality inherent in the work of the Argentine master of sound. The perfect phrases (recorded over a period of 15 years; the excerpts from “Don Rodrigo” being first recordings) practically hypnotize the listener with their intensity.

Classical
Plácido Domingo:
Ginastera — the Vocal Album
Warner Classics
Neil Fisher

June 3 2016,  The  Times

★★★★☆

           It has taken a very long time, but at least Plácido Domingo’s celebration of Ginastera has made it    out for the 100th anniversary year of Argentina’s national composer. The Uruguayan-born conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor started planning The Vocal Album in 1999. Recording began in 2002, when Ana María Martínez laid down her very fiery take on the early Cinco Canciones Populares Argentinas, in a newly orchestrated (and slightly over-egged) version by Shimon Cohen.

Various wrangles then meant that Domingo had to record his contributions to two chunky extracts from the 1964 opera Don Rodrigo without his duetting soprano, Virginia Tola, who also sings the 1971 cantata Milena. His parts were finished only in 2014, then another hiatus delayed the album’s release further.

These complications don’t dent the expressive power of those late works, however. If the Canciones belong to Ginastera’s “nationalist” period, Don Rodrigo and Milena come from the part of the composer’s life when he drifted to European modernism. Don Rodrigo has the heated plot of a verismo firecracker by Montemezzi or Wolf-Ferrari — the eponymous king rapes a woman he has sworn to protect, loses Spain, but is redeemed by a divine bell-ringing miracle. Yet its music sounds more like Alban Berg’s, the violence delivered in grinding dissonances and jagged vocal writing.

Domingo championed the same role at New York City Opera 50 years ago, and it’s remarkable enough that he came back to it. Some vocal tiredness doesn’t dilute his expressive force, and he skilfully judges the contrast between the two scenes, the first showing the king crazed by perverse passion, the second aged and spent. He is well partnered by the Argentinian Tola, and Ben-Dor conducts the Santa Barbara Symphony orchestra with plenty of heat.

        Milena is the most compelling work on the album, however. Here Tola superbly sings and declaims extracts from the letters that Franz Kafka sent to the journalist Milena Jesenská (her replies are lost, alas). They are not love letters by any traditional measure — the famously un-optimistic author writes at one point that “we are both married, you to your husband in Vienna, I to anguish in Prague” — and Ginastera responds appropriately.

In alternating sections marked “Prose” and “Cantus”, he uses sepulchral colours and the eerie glint of electronic effects to create a chilling backdrop for the soloist to deliver Kafka’s paranoid angst. In the last section Ginastera quotes from the final song of Schubert’s Winterreise and then the music disappears into greyness.

May 2016
Andrew Farach-Colton
GINASTERA The Vocal Album

Plácido Domingo sang the title-role in the US premiere of Alberto Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo with the New York City Opera in February 1966, inaugurating the company’s new home at Lincoln Center. Domingo’s career skyrocketed from there – although, sadly, neither Ginastera’s opera nor the City Opera itself fared quite so well. Thus there is no complete recording of Don Rodrigo, the first of Ginastera’s three operas (only Bomarzo was recorded in full and even that never made it to CD), so we must be especially grateful to Domingo for paying homage to his youthful triumph with these excerpts.

Pirated recordings of those 1966 City Opera performances are readily available, however, and comparing them with this new account, it’s astonishing how fresh Domingo still sounds 50 years later. It’s all the more impressive, considering that Ginastera’s score is comparable to Berg’s Lulu both stylistically and in its extreme technical demands. In fact, Domingo sounds far more expressive and fearless here, navigating the precipitous vocal lines with ease.

Reviewing the City Opera’s landmark production, New York Times critic Harold C Schonberg praised Ginastera’s ‘compositional surety’ but lamented the ‘lack of anything touching the heart’. Yet, in this account, the passion is palpable and often profoundly moving. Domingo conveys Rodrigo’s compulsive, destructive ardour with conviction and, more importantly, compassion. Virginia Tola is somewhat aloof as Florinda, the object of Rodrigo’s obsession, but shows more of her emotional mettle in Milena, Ginastera’s harrowing monodrama based on Kafka’s love letters. Phyllis Curtin, who recorded this cantata in the ’70s (Phoenix), offers greater richness and variety of tone; but Ginastera set the text in Spanish and, ultimately, Tola’s fluency packs a stronger punch.

The programme opens with a setting of popular Argentine songs in colourfully effective yet respectful orchestral arrangements, and Ana María Martínez sings them with gusto and an appropriate feeling of bittersweet nostalgia. Gisèle Ben-Dor draws secure and characterful playing from the Santa Barbara Symphony throughout.

Andrew Clements

Wednesday 9 March 2016

Placido Domingo revisits a past glory

Dramatic intensity … Placido Domingo sings extracts from Don Rodrigo, in which he first starred in 1966.

The discs that have already appeared to mark the centenary of the birth of Alberto Ginastera, which falls next month, mostly focus on the Argentinian’s flashier, better known orchestral scores. But this vocal collection is much more enterprising: alongside an orchestral arrangement of the early and unashamedly nationalist Five Popular Argentinian Songs there are two scenes from Ginastera’s almost forgotten first opera, Don Rodrigo, as well as the equally neglected cantata Milena, which sets extracts from Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena.

The opera was completed in 1964 and the cantata seven years later. They both belong to what Ginastera called his “neo-expressionist” period, in which he adopted a 12-note technique (though without ever really losing touch with tonality) and included aleatoric passages in his scores. The results are close to the world of Berg at times, and the highly wrought, anguished vocal writing of the opera – built around the character of Roderic, the last Visigoth king of Spain, who probably died at the hands of the invading Moors in the 8th century – certainly recalls parts of Wozzeck. Milena is, if anything, even more intriguing. From a collage of excerpts in Spanish translation from Kafka’s text, Ginastera created a patchwork of dreams and longings that he shaped into five movements and scored with amazing imagination, using his experience of electronic music to create a shimmering, enchanted orchestral sound world. It’s a strikingly beautiful piece – a real discovery – which fades away with echoes of the last song in Schubert’s Winterreise.

The performances have real authority. When Don Rodrigo received its US premiere at New York City Opera in 1966, the title role was sung by a young tenor then at the beginning of his international career. It’s a role that Placido Domingo was always keen to repeat, and though we only get him singing two sections of the opera here – the climactic rape scene from the second act, and the final scene of the third, when the despairing Rodrigo dies and all the bells of Spain spontaneously ring out – they are enough to show the dramatic intensity he must have brought to it 50 years ago. The demanding part of Florinda, Rodrigo’s lover, is taken by Virginia Tola, though she is even more impressive threading her silvery soprano through the textures of Milena.

Assembling this disc has clearly been a labour of love for conductor Gisele Ben-Dor. It has taken her 15 years with the Santa Barbara Symphony, and to judge from the recording details, it’s been a tortuous process. Ana María Martínez’s performance of the Popular Songs dates back to 2002, while Tola recorded Milena and her part in the Don Rodrigo excerpts in 2008, before Domingo added his contributions in 2011 and 2014.

You hardly notice the joins, though, and in any case much of the music is such a treat that it doesn’t matter at all.

May 2016