Zagreb Guitar Quartet

“After their performance, all that one could do was to get out and scream:
Viva guitarra!”

This experienced ensemble of young musicians - Tomislav Vasilj, Krunoslav Pehar, Melita Ivković, Mak Grgić - has performed from Canada to India, from Russia to South Africa; successfully appeared at several prestigious international competitions; premiered 10 dedications by contemporary Croatian composers; given a world premiere of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of the Fugue arranged for four guitars.

Astor Piazzolla and the New Tango

Piazzolla explained the history of tango and his role in it, by dividing it into traditional Argentinean tango (since 1880), the "grotesque Hollywood tango of Rudolf Valentino ending with Spanish olé, the "dancing" tango created by Anibal Troilo dating from 1940 "when the whole of Buenos Aires dressed, talked and walked like tango. "And when I arrived in 1954, a different tango appeared; intellectual, one that wasn't sung and danced to, that was not old-fashioned or traditional, there was a chamber air to it, it was a tango for thinking".

Tango Nuevo appeared in 1954 summing up all the Piazzolla's musical experiences up to date and shocking traditionalists: it was the result of classical education, interest in the original folk music of his own land, jazz and all the other influences that he collected along with his cosmopolitan way of life.

He was born of Italian immigrants in 1921, in Mar de Plata, Argentina. From 1924 till 1937 he lived in New York with his family and started taking piano classes with Bela Wilda (one of Rahmanjinoff's students) who also arranged Bach's compositions for bandoneon, an instrument that nine year old Astor got as a present from his father. Soon, the young bandoneonist would catch the eye of Carlos Gardel, the biggest name of his time in the world of tango. They collaborated on the score for "El día que me quieras" and this marked the beginning of Piazzolla's long career as a film composer, a career that spanned fifty projects. It is interesting to note that he refused two most intriguing offers: in 1935 Gardel's invitation to move to Hollywood, and in 1972 an offer in Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris". In 1937 he returned to Buenos Aires and joined the city's musical circles. He got in touch with two people particularly important for his development: Alberto Ginastera with whom he started studying composition in 1940, and Anibal 'Pichuco' Troilo, bandoneonist and the leader of a famous orchestra. The latter was Piazzolla's great idol and Piazzolla used to play with him until 1946 when he formed his Orquesta Tipica, at that time still traditionally oriented.

1954 was the outbreak year in his career: After winning several composition competitions and finishing his conducting studies with Hermann Scherchen, he left to study composition in Paris sponsored by the French government. His tutor would be Nadia Boulanger, the famous composer and pedagogue. He arrived, in his own words, with "50 - 60 kilograms" (!) of symphonic, piano and chamber music, but she advised him (and that would turn out to be crucial) to build his style upon the tradition of tango which he would enrich with everything else he knew, and to abandon the music where there is "some Bartók, some Stravinsky, some Hindemith and no Piazzolla".

Another great influence was the fact that Paris at the time was the world center of jazz and Piazzolla got in contact with famous musicians. He was particularly impressed by Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophonist) with whom he would accomplish the first of his two extraordinary collaborations in 1974; the second followed with vibraphonist Gary Burton at the 1986 edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival. The parallels with jazz go further than mere jazzing: I would compare the way he used classic forms and the elegance with which he brought originally bordello music into concert halls with what the Modern Jazz Quartet used to do.

After returning to Argentina he formed El Octeto de Buenos Aires. He presented his new tango and encountered total disapproval from the tangueros who only perceived in it the ridiculing of the object of national reverence. He became the target of menaces and intolerance to the point of physical danger. Nobody spared him, not even Jorge Luis Borges, who once in a club after listening to a part of his concert got up and yelled to his colleague Ernesto Sabato, loud enough for everybody to hear: "Let's go, because tonight they're not playing tango here!" (Piazzolla didn't take it too badly: a few years later he wrote music for a selection of Borges' poems.

In 1960 he formed Quinteto Nuevo Tango (bandoneon, violin, piano, electric guitar, double bass), probably his most successful ensemble. About the same time he began to work with the writer Horacio Ferrer and their collaboration resulted in the operetta Maria de Buenos Aires and the oratorio El Pueblo Joven. In the seventies Piazzolla started building a career in Europe. He began in the land of his ancestors giving a series of concerts in the Italian-Latinoamerican Institute in Rome with his famous "group of the nine" (Conjunto nueve: bandoneon, string quartet, piano, guitar, double bass, percussion). It wasn't until the eighties that he received unqualified recognition from the world audience and from musicians of the most diverse ranks when his compositions were commissioned by Mstislav Rostopovich and the Kronos Quartet, the world's biggest names in contemporary jazz (Joe Zawinul, Pat Metheney) praised him as their favorite musician, and Grace Jones took his Libertango (I've Seen That Face Before) to reach the top of her career. Piazzolla will probably never reach the heights of success with the ordinary audience. He spent his last years mostly in Buenos Aires where he died on 4th of July 1992 from heart attack.

(©1998 Melita Ivkovic)