Concerto para bandoneon, piano, cuerdas y percusión: Moderato

Concerto for bandoneon, piano, strings and percussion: Moderato does not sound like a waltz or a classic tango. It sounds like a cross between the weight of a bandoneon dragging across the staff and the precision of a piano marking the rhythm as if walking on a tightrope. There is something in that tension between the organic and the calculated that makes the piece never fully resolve: the bandoneon insists on a melody that seems to seek an exit, while the strings and percussion respond with sharp phrases, as if each note were a step into unknown territory. It is not music to dance to, but to listen to closely, almost as if the listener had to decipher a code where each instrument plays at hiding and appearing.

Piazzolla composed this piece in the 1970s, when he had already spent decades breaking the rules of the tango he had learned from the Old Guard. He had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and that gave him tools to blend tango with harmonies that sounded like Stravinsky or Bartók. But in the Concerto, there is not just theory: there is a Buenos Aires that throbs in every chord, in that Moderato that advances with the same stubbornness with which Piazzolla defended his music when purists shouted that he was killing the tango. It lasted six minutes and forty-four seconds, but within that time, decades of musical history fit.