The new tango form owes an immeasurable debt to the classically trained Astor Piazzolla (he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger), who wrote some of the genre’s most memorable works, carried the form to new heights of sophistication and seemingly single-handedly delivered the music to new audiences. Piazzolla’s overtly progressive approach to his art was and is one of the most vital antidotes to the museum-curator mentality that so often predominates when the European tradition peers warily at the music of other cultures, unable to view what it sees in anything other than a kind of freeze-frame, purist way.
This brings me, warily, to Kremer’s recording, which regrettably takes Piazzolla’s music, plus three works by other composers (the presence of a piece by Kancheli on a disc such as this is a perfect example of the ongoing interpenetration of world musical cultures) and stuffs it all back into the museum, albeit into a different department – truly a new-fangled tango, an old-fashioned notion. It is a great shame that the ‘chamberization’ of so much truly creative music always seems to sanitize it out of existence. It happened with jazz, it happened with rembetika, it’s still happening with klezmer. All the ideas seem to be there, but they are mostly conveyed with little conviction, like bad Lieder, and the arrangements are simply too polite.
Marcucci, on the other hand, is a first-hand practitioner of the art, although the booklet-notes reveal a fascinating and diverse biography, including sometime membership of the folk group Los Paraguayos, rarely far from the turntable during the days of the BBC Light Programme. The disc offers a fine selection of Piazzolla’s works together with several by various of his contemporaries, such as Cobian, also featured on the Kremer disc, who is perhaps best-known for his contribution to the tango-cancion song tradition. Marcucci performs with total conviction and an almost overwhelming emotional intensity which nevertheless encompasses the delicacy necessary for conveying the melodic nuances of the form. The Ensemble Piacevole are sensitive and responsive throughout. The disc includes two extra tracks offering a sample from another tango CD from the Channel Classics catalogue, which is an intelligent and helpful idea.'