Review: Piazzolla: The Years of the Shark

Piazzolla (right) with his son Daniel in New York

 

A week after attending the Hong Kong Philharmonic's tribute to Argentinian composer Astor Piazzola, I went to see a documentary about him as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Called Piazzolla: The Years of the Shark, it uses extensive film and recording footage from the family to reconstruct his life.

Before the movie started, we were supposed to be treated to a musician playing the bandoneon, the accordion-like instrument Piazzolla played, but this was cancelled due to social-distancing. Nevertheless we were told that the bandoneon is not like an accordion in that there is no keyboard, but lots of buttons on each side and you can't see them so you have to know how to play the bandoneon well.

Piazzolla and his bandoneon

It is also quite heavy, which is why many bandoneon players sit down, but Piazzolla preferred to stand. When playing the instrument moving the bellows in and out can result in key changes, playing one note then changing to another which was interesting to learn.

These tips helped us appreciate the film more, particularly watching Piazzolla play -- it's quite heavy and early on in Piazzolla: The Years of the Shark, after he was born, his right leg was disfigured because of polio and it took seven operations to fix it, though not completely; his right leg would forever be thinner and shorter than his left.

After having gone through so much when he was young, his parents decided not to have anymore children, but also his father may have felt Piazzolla learning an instrument would be better for him career-wise. After those operations in 1924, the family moved to New York from Buenos Aires by ship, and his father worked for a barber. 

He bought his eight-year-old son a bandoneon from a pawnshop and Piazzolla learned how to play it and was pretty good at it. He wanted to play JS Bach on the bandoneon as well as his teacher did on the piano.

Piazzolla's teacher Nadia Boulanger

When he was 17-years-old, Piazzolla was itching to perform and have his own orchestra and on his own moved back to Buenos Aires. He played with some bands -- the youngest of the group. Piazzolla had always had dreams of becoming a concert pianist and one time boldly met Arthur Rubenstein, who in turn introduced the young musician to teacher Alberto Ginastera, who taught him composition and the fundamentals of music.

In 1946 Piazzolla started his own band, though later focusing only on compositions, not wanting to play the bandoneon anymore.

It was winning a composing contest in 1951 that awarded him a scholarship to study in Paris under Nadia Boulanger, whose students include Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Quincy Jones and Burt Bacharach.

She looked at the Argentine's scores and said this is not Piazzolla. She asked him what instrument he played and he said the bandoneon and she made him play some tango pieces.

This, she said, was Piazzolla.

He said from then onwards he never stopped playing the bandoneon.

In 1955 Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires bursting with creativity and created his own style of tango, where the rhythm kept changing, more upbeat and experimenting with different sounds from instruments. 

Daniel did not speak to his father for 10 years

Traditionalists hated him -- even a taxi driver refused to pick him up for what he felt was ruining tango.

His personal life was also full of ups and downs. He married Dede Baralis and had two children, Daniel and Diana. But later on Piazzolla announced to the family he was leaving his wife and met his second love, Laura Escalada.

Needless to say the family was shocked -- his wife Dede sank into deep depression, after having supported her husband's career.

His son Daniel, shown in the film, had a falling out with his father at one point, claiming the music they were making was backwards. That led to a 10-year estrangement. Daniel goes over old tapes, recordings, family movies, as a museum prepares a major exhibition about his father.

Piazzolla perseveres, but not without health issues (smoking a lot and suffered a heart attack). One of the final scenes in the documentary shows him in a tuxedo performing with an orchestra, making his music legitimate in the classical music world, though he had been experimenting with all kinds of musicians and different styles throughout the decades.

Piazzolla is known for revolutionizing the tango

He was so passionate about his music, writing 750 compositions, many of them themed around the tango. In the end he was grateful to his father for giving him the bandoneon, for without it he would not know what he would have done with his life.

Director Daniel Rosenfeld went through a lot of raw material, tapes, recordings, family films, using archival footage to put most of the documentary together. Piazzolla's son Daniel is a vehicle to move from one aspect to another, and sometimes he says things, and other times it's recordings of his father and sometimes it was confusing to follow who is speaking. 

Not once does any subject do a straight-up interview to the camera. It is either narrated or clips are found from actual archival footage, which makes the film flow. And yes there's lots of Piazzolla performing, making it a film filled with music, music and more music.

Piazzolla: The Years of the Shark 

Director: Daniel Rosenfeld

94 minutes 

In Spanish, French and English with English subtitles

 

 

Piazzolla's Tango on Stage

A clear view of the HK Philharmonic with social-distancing

Last night, for the first time in over a year, I attended a concert by the Hong Kong Philharmonic in the Concert Hall of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

The concert, called "Piazzolla at 100!" featured the works of Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, who would have been 100 on March 11. He is best known for his tango music, the most famous piece is Libertango.

When concertgoers entered the Cultural Centre, they had to either use the LeaveHomeSafe app, or write down their contact details. Seating inside the concert hall was quite spread out, with four people sitting together, separated by several seats and another set of four. 

The first three rows were blocked off, so I essentially sat in the first row! What a treat!

Piazzolla would have been 100 years old this year

All the orchestra members were masked except of course those playing wind instruments, who were separated by plexiglass partitions. Musicians usually sit in pairs sharing music, but now were spread out and each had their own music stand.

Argentine conductor Mariano Chiacchiarini, who is based in Germany, went through the 21-day quarantine in Hong Kong to lead a few concerts, including one on Brahms last week. I was surprised to see him come out with one of those plastic see-through masks, but realized he needed to show his facial expressions more clearly to the orchestra members.

He is very energetic and knowledgeable about Piazzolla, who was born in Argentina, but then moved to New York with his family when he was four years old. There he was exposed to tango through his father's records, and learned pieces by Bach on a bandoneon, a button accordion.

The first piece, Tangazo starts off slow and then becomes a very robust tango style. Piazzolla, Chiacchiarini explains, liked to use a lot of percussion in his work, even having the double bass musicians hit their instrument like a drum, or knock on it, while violinists make a funny squiggly sound, and even one that sounds like a quirky whip.

Tango purists did not like Piazzolla was doing to the music, and the conductor said that even taxi drivers refused to pick up the composer in protest, but he didn't mind -- he felt he was helping tango music not only gain a wider audience but also developed it further.

Piazzolla first learned music on the bandoneon

The second piece, The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, which is inspired by Vivaldi's Four Seasons, except Piazzolla's version starts with Summer, then Autumn, Winter then Spring. Here they played Winter and Spring. Originally it was only supposed to be played by a few instruments, and Piazzolla wrote it like a violin concerto, with the solo by the HK Phil's concert master, Jing Wang. 

He came out in a black T-shirt under a black jacket that had a dazzling silver spine at the back. One could tell he was itching to play and got a warm applause afterwards.

The orchestra also played music by Piazzolla's teacher, Alberto Ginastera called Estancia: Four Dances, op. 8a. When Ginastera was 25-years-old he was commissioned by the New York City Ballet's precursor to write a ballet score based on Argentine country life.

He wrote a one-act ballet where a city boy falls in love with the daughter of a cattle ranch owner, but he can only win her heart in a dancing contest with local cowboys. This piece had a very lively finish and we could imagine how the dancing went down in the competition!

Next up, some tango! Raymond Chu and Lily Cheng are well known in Hong Kong for their tango dancing and they came on stage -- very narrow due to the social-distancing of the musicians -- for them to dance. They seemed to look down on the ground often at first, perhaps a bit nervous about how much room they had to dance around in.

Lily Cheng and Raymond Chu danced the tango

But it was nice to see them dance to music by Piazzolla's contemporaries, like Gerardo Matos Rodriguez, and Julian Plaza. Chu and Cheng made it fun. In Piazzolla's Libertango, Cheng comes out on stage, but Chu hasn't arrived. Chiacchiarini turns around and she signals to him, Can you dance with me?

And he obliges and they twirl around a bit before Chu finally emerges on stage. Chiacchiarini points to his watch as if to say, "You're late!"

Check out this video of him conducting Libertango at the Lucerne Festival last year with fantastic tango dancers.

Afterwards the audience couldn't stop clapping for an encore (which sadly was a slow piece), but nevertheless, was a wonderful way to cap off a tough week for me work-wise and left me hoping to attend more concerts again in the future.

Piazzolla at 100!

Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, April 16

Piazzolla: Tangazo

Piazzolla: The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires: Winter, Spring

Ginastera: Estancia: Four Dances

Matos Rodriguez: La Cumparsita

Plaza: Nocturna

Piazzolla: Libertango

Playing the Tango

The members getting a standing ovation from some audience members

Over the Christmas holidays my friend YTSL asked me to go see a Tango-themed music concert in January. I said sure, as I like Tango music. We went this evening to see Viva Tango! The music of Schifrin and Piazzolla at the City Hall Concert Hall and weren't disappointed.

It was put on by the Beare's Premiere Music Festival, formerly known as the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival, with Beare being a well known violin dealer based in London that specializes in antique stringed instruments.

The ensemble of musicians was diverse -- Cho-Liang Lin from Taiwan, who is also artistic director of the music festival, Argentine-born cellist Pablo Aslan who lives in New York, Alex Brown also from the US, Hector del Curto from Argentina and plays the bandoneon, kind of like an accordion, clarinetist David Shifrin from New York, and Satoshi Takeishi from Japan on percussion.

The ensemble played very well together

It was nice having Aslan introducing the music because he gave some context about why a piece was composed or what the composer was like and he would tell it in a funny way.

Another interesting tidbit is that the clarinetist Shifrin is the second cousin twice removed of Lalo Schifrin, who not only composes tango music as he's from Buenos Aires, Argentina, but he is also know for composing music scores, including Mission Impossible, Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon, Dirty Harry, and wrote many arrangements for the Three Tenors concerts.

So the clarinetist and the composer, their grandfathers were brothers. One went to the America, the other to South America.

The first half of the concert was dedicated to Schirfrin's music starting with a classic tango style -- Tango del Atardecer, that set the tone for the evening. Perhaps it was just missing some dancers doing the tango on stage, but really the music was so engaging that it was fun to watch them play -- and play very well together.



The third piece, Tango Borealis was slow but had a wonderful soft, elegant finish. The pace picked up with Malambo de los Llanos. Apparently the Malambo is a dance and Hector the bandeoneon was asked to demonstrate a few steps for us which was fun to watch.

After the intermission we were then introduced to Astor Piazzolla's music that started with Michelangelo 70 that was not a tribute to the Renaissance artist, but to a bar that Piazzolla and his band played at.

Piazzolla was born in Argentina then moved to New York and was exposed to a variety of music that is what makes his so eclectic, but still very much in the style of tango.

We were particularly enamoured with the piece Oblivion that was so beautifully performed with a light touch at the end. Here's a sample of Piazzolla playing the piece himself on the bandoneon:



The audience was just as thrilled to hear the music as we were -- though it was not completely full -- and the ensemble were probably pleased to see Hong Kong enjoying the music too. It wasn't too hard to twist their arm to do an encore for us and cellist Aslan joked that we really came to the concert to hear the piece of music they were about to play -- Mission Impossible by Schifrin!

It was funny to hear a small six-piece band play the theme song on a violin, a clarinet, piano, bandoneon and a cello! But here's Schifrin himself performing it in 2011. By the way he received an honorary Oscar in November for his contribution to soundtracks over the decades.



What I enjoyed about the concert was that it was a fusion of tango, jazz, and a bit of classical all rolled up together that made for a memorable evening.

Viva Tango! The Music of Schifrin & Piazzolla
Concert Hall Hong Kong City Hall

Schifrin: Letters from Argentina
Tango del Atardecer
Pampas
Tango Borealis
Danza de los Montes
Tango a Borges
Malambo de los Llanos

Piazzolla: Selected Tangos
Michelangelo 70
Verano Porteno
Adios Nonino
La Muerte del Angel
Oblivion
Libertango