Piazzolla Cien Años: Lord of the Tango@100
Raul Da Gama, NOV 5, 2021
…….nuevo tango continues to burn, now seemingly with an eternal flame, one hundred years on. ….. celebrated Uruguayan conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor, a fierce champion of South American music composers. Her brilliant work with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston features the prodigious composer and bandoneonist Juanjo Mosalini, and also features world premieres of works by both Piazzolla and Mosalini.
Piazzolla Cien Años – Juanjo Mosalini – Gisèle Ben-Dor – Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra
Gisèle Ben-Dor is a conductor who clearly dines far further afield than many of her contemporaries, offering more than the meat-and-potatoes repertoire offered by a majority of her peers. Her interpretation of Mr Piazzolla’s great work “Aconcagua: Concerto for Bandoneón [1979]” gives new meaning to the phrase: “a sense of time and place”. Moreover, in these works, Ms Ben-Dor conveys the sense of Piazzolla being a distinctively Argentinean composer on the scale of Ginastera. In the concerto, for instance, she brings a special alertness to the pointing of phrase and building of form that makes sense of the composer’s unique way with tango.
…it is Ms Ben-Dor who must be principally credited for the deftness that she brings to the movements……, with a flexible but coherent movement takes her time to draw out the second “Moderato” movement, which steals in with sensuous reticence.
The manner in which each of Mr Piazzolla’s picturesque episode and naturalistic detail is called to mind, the synchronicity of motion and expressive intent within the concerto as well as in the other works is passionately conveyed.
This recording is one of the most memorable of all those that now serve to mark the centenary celebrations of the Argentinean maestro, not simply by the grand scale of it all, but by the sizzling performances, the magnificent retelling of the Piazzolla story, by painting vivid pictures with picture and painting coming dramatically alive as if in the day when the great one himself inhabited these pieces.
Raul Da Gama
Based in Milton, Ontario, Canada, Raul is a poet, musician and an accomplished critic whose profound analysis is reinforced by his deep understanding of music, technically as well as historically.