The CSO celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month
Writer Neil Gaiman and Magnetic Fields front man Stephin Merritt once discussed the satirical 1959 song “The Masochism Tango” written and performed by Tom Lehrer, and they pointed out that although the masochism was the transgressive element when the song was written, however, today the tango is the transgressive element.
As absurd as that sounds, it rings true, in an age and among a generation where ironic distance and detachment is de rigueur, rather than candid and outspoken passion, represented by the fiery dance and music of the tango.
The most prominent 20th century composer with strong ties to tango music is Astor Piazzolla from Argentina, who developed a new tango style—nuevo tango—expanding tango’s instrumentation, taking influence from jazz and bringing tango into the realm of classical music, much to the dismay of tango purists.
Tango originated in the late 19th century among immigrants in the music halls of slums around the border between Argentina and Uruguay, fusing elements from various African, South American and European music styles in conjunction with a new dance.
Overcoming disdain from the stuffy and uptight, the popularity of the tango exploded in the early 20th century as it spread to Paris, then other major European cities and beyond, with the public embracing it as closely as its participating couples held each other.
This Thursday, September 27, the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra presents its tribute to Hispanic Heritage Month with a striking program that features Piazzolla’s “Estaciones Porteñas” (“The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”) with violinist Eduardo Rios, Douglas Hedwig’s “Fanfare Alegre: Dia de la Fiesta,” Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture” and Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’ suite from the 1939 film “La Noche de los Mayas.”
While “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” works naturally as a whole, its four pieces actually weren’t originally composed together as a suite.
Piazzolla wrote “Verano Porteño” (“Buenos Aires Summer”) in 1965 as incidental music for the play “Melenita de Oro” written by his friend Alberto Rodriguez Muñoz, and after nearly forgetting about a scheduled recording session of his yet-to-be-written pieces, he ended up composing the required music overnight—an example of extreme procrastination becoming transformed into an awe-inspiring act of creative badassery.
Several years later, Piazzolla represented the remaining three seasons in song—“Invierno Porteño” (“Buenos Aires Winter”), “Primavera Porteña” (“Buenos Aires Spring”) and “Otoño Porteño” (“Buenos Aires Autumn”)—and in the late ‘90s, Leonid Desyatnikov reworked the pieces into the 4-part suite arrangement most commonly heard today, featuring a solo violin with string orchestra.
Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer—one of the foremost contemporary performers of Piazzolla’s work—helped to popularize Desyatnikov’s recomposition, which quotes passages from Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” drawing parallels between the two works.
The featured violinist for the Chattanooga performance of “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” will be Eduardo Rios, originally from Peru but now a Los Angeles resident and Artist’s Diploma candidate at the Colburn School Conservatory of Music.
Although just in his early twenties, Rios is an international performer, a first-prize $50,000 award winner at the Sphinx Competition, and a recent recipient of a Los Angeles Philharmonic Resident Fellowship.
At the age of ten, Rios saw his first symphony concert in Lima and quickly knew that he wanted to pursue the violin as his life’s calling, and astoundingly, in less than four years after seeing that concert, Rios debuted as a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra of Peru.
While Rios’ path seemed to reveal itself with certainty relatively quickly, in the case of Piazzolla, it was entirely possible that his primary musical direction could have gone a different way, had he not studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1954; she strongly encouraged him to build upon Argentine sources, although Piazzolla was ashamed to admit to her that he was a tango musician.
Boulanger analyzed Piazzolla’s symphonies and sonatas—which resembled the work of 20th century European classical composers—but, as recalled by Piazzolla in a 1989 interview published in El Mercurio, “She said: ‘Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartok, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can’t find Piazzolla in this.’”
“She asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own,” said Piazzolla. “She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: ‘You idiot, that’s Piazzolla!’ And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.”
And that fiery and impulsive act sounds exactly like something someone infected by the spirit of tango would do.
Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra featuring Eduardo Rios, violin presents Piazzolla’s Four Seasons
Thursday, September 27, 7:30 p.m.
Tivoli Theater
709 Broad St.
chattanoogasymphony.org