Piazzolla, Le Grand Tango

The 1935 film starring Carlos Gardel, "El día que me quieras" ("The day you will love me"), includes a scene in which a boy shows up selling newspapers. The twelve-year-old boy was not an actor. He was a musician. For three years he had been practicing the bandoneon given by his father when he was nine. He did not imagine then that he would become one of the greatest musical figures in South America and an important composer among those who emerged throughout the world in the twentieth century. His name is Astor Piazzolla, born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921.

The tour it was not
The Piazzolla family had moved from Buenos Aires to New York in 1924 in search of better opportunities. There, Astor's father, also a musician, met Carlos Gardel and made some recordings with him. After the film was finished, Gardel decided to start an ambitious tour of South America and invited the young Piazzolla to accompany him. Fortunately, the boy declined the invitation, and thus saved his life from the accident that took Gardel's life.

Return to the homeland

Astor Piazzolla (1921 - 1990)

In 1936 the family returned to Mar del Plata. From then
until around 1950, Astor Piazzolla joined tango orchestras playing the bandoneon but without abandoning his piano and composition studies.
He began to establish links between tango as a popular dance and his approach to classical music, which his teacher Alberto Ginastera reinforced by making him study Ravel, Bartok, and Stravinski, as well as American jazz.
As a result of all this, his work "Buenos Aires", from 1953,
is to cause a small stir in the musical circles of Buenos Aires due to the use of bandoneon in the symphony orchestra.

Le Grand Tango
The following year, the author of Adiós Nonino won a scholarship to study in Paris with the influential pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. It was she who encouraged Piazzolla to revitalize tango on the basis of the classical and jazz training he had acquired. One of the best examples of the course his music took is the 1982 piece, "Le Grand Tango", premiered by the cellist to whom it was addressed eight years after its composition. Yes, because before that date, Mstislav Rostropovich had never heard of Astor Piazzolla, who, as a bandoneon player in Buenos Aires, had, a little earlier, become the creator of a new genre, the symphonic tango.

The rendition is by Chinese cellist Adam Liu and American pianist David A. Wehr.