infotext:
Maria de Buenos Aires »... when a mystery seizes my voice, How do you know the strange Spanish new word operata by little opera translate without diluting the tragic ardor of María de Buenos Aires and the feverish violence of a rousing artistic encounter? In 1968 the composer Astor Piazzolla and the poet Horacio Ferrer created an outrageous and devastating work, a sublime pagan oratorio whose fallen Virgin, "forgotten among all women", "omen among all women", sings and embodies the tango up to their doom in the dark alleys of the port of the Argentine capital in the 1920s, between dive bars and brothels, among drunkards, whores, pimps and murderers. This universal work, felt at its premiere as a double profanation of the traditional tango and of the liturgical spirit, embodies a state of mind transcending all epochs, an intense existential feeling: the interior and shared exploration of a fissure, an anguish, a pain that you could sing out to inspire hope... Like the Portuguese nostalgia or the black-American blues, the Argentine tango is also a distorting mirror, in the depths of which reality is revealed - and so much stylized that it exudes a previously inaudible meaning. In this black and sensual musical fairy tale, this radiant negative of the Gospel Passion, Piazzolla and Ferrer free the tango from the codex and straitjacket of the 'cymbal dance' in which folklore has imprisoned it. They snatch him from the real man's passionate duel with the whore to conform to his original, desperate swing: the surge of a "sad thought danced," as Ernesto Sabato wrote; astringent and penetrating, in search of meaning if not salvation. Born on the street and from the excitement of a port-folk of misfits and exiles, illuminated by the echoes of the great sacred works of Bach, the vulnerable romanticism of Bartók or the brilliant impudence of Stravinsky, he lets out his mystical and bold, unique and outrageous voice, more suited to listening than was written for pantomime imitation. The Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles loves to navigate the squalls and storms of the ›inner sea‹, far removed from compartmentalized genres, musical dogmas and narrow-minded labels. Although present, the ensemble throws off the heavy, strictly regulated avant-garde baggage of so-called New Music and impetuously commits itself to the vision of a ›timeless music‹ of its artistic director Jean-Paul Dessy. This lively and sensitive commitment fits perfectly into the timeless spirit of Maria de Buenos Aires: »Timeless music is committed to diverse brotherhood across epochs and genres. The fantasy of today's folklore is universal. […] At all times, the popular provided the basis for the most highly developed varieties of music. Timeless music is able to find the right sublimation of folk music by art music, far from the contemptuous arrogance that is incapable of recognizing the treasures hidden in the popular hotbed, far from the complacency that hastily and at any price, including that of the most absurd vulgarity that wants to add seduction.« (Jean-Paul Dessy, La music intemporaine, in: Revue Musiques Nouvelles No. 3, February 2009) Astor Piazzolla had to fight against the musical prejudices of his time to dare to draw from his nourishing roots and the tango newo to invent! His father had given him a bandoneon very early on; he founded stimulating, dynamic and innovative tango ensembles, always dying to break away from popular rhythms. He fervently studied composition with Alberto Ginastera in Argentina, then conducting with Hermann Scherchen in Europe; it was Nadia Boulanger, whose classes he attended in Paris, who encouraged him to connect to the musical traditions of Argentina in order to find his inner path there: the tango. »The tango is sad, dramatic, but not pessimistic. It was the old tango, with its absurd lyrics.« (Astor Piazzolla, 1989, in an interview in Chile.) The encounter with jazz, in New York, between 1958 and 1960, breathed into his music that essential, animalistic swing that who lays bare the ardent, abysmal excitement of his works. With Maria de Buenos Aires, his only opera, Astor Piazzolla sublimates the spirit of the tango and lets it speak again. El Duende, María and the bandoneon create an enlightened collision: Horacio Ferrer's rough, buzzing text, of suggestive and violent vitality, rich in evocative neologisms with musical assonances, shot through with powerful symbolism, collides with the beguiling verve of Astor Piazzolla's music, hers proud and wild swing of the hips flirting with jazz and milonga, their folksy fire boldly structured by the exquisite intelligence of serious music. The operatic form itself indulges in debauchery, a ragged succession of sixteen scenes in two terse, haunting, impassioned acts, telling a slum legend: María, a young worker in a textile factory in Buenos Aires, becomes a tango singer – until her untimely death in a brothel. Buried under the asphalt of the big city in 1910, half a century later she is brought back to life by El Duende, a demon mortal in love with the rhythm she embodies, a black evangelist of her downfall, and lets herself be carried away by the bandoneon into the languorous and sallow spiral of the tango - until their eternal, light rebirth. This shameless mixture of the sacred and the profane, the surreal poetry and the musical daring of the Maria de Buenos Aires open up very willingly to the energy of talented musicians, to whom she knows how to give opportunities to improvise and rights to some current arrangements, without giving up neither their flesh nor their soul. Timelessly modern and fascinating lives Maria de Buenos Aires by the breath of those who approach her, by her dreams and her creative tensions. The poignant, exciting and warm voices of Argentinian Gustavo Beytelmann, Brussels native Delphine Gardin and Chilean Roberto Cordova, the rapturous strings of Venezuelan violinist David Núñez, the heartbreaking bandoneon of Finland's Ville Hiltula and the burning fervor of the Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles bear witness to this once again . Isabelle Françaix |
program:
Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) Delphine Gardin, singer Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles Jean Paul Dessy, artistic director SA CD 1 Part [01] Cuadro 1: Alevare 06:54 SA CD 2 Second [01] Cuadro 9: Contramilonga a la Funerala por la Primera Muerte de Maria 06:19 |