Classical Music | Cello Music

Recorded on 08/14/2007, uploaded on 01/17/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Le Grand Tango for Cello and Piano              Astor Piazzolla

There have been many Tango composers in its now century-old tradition. Foremost among them was Astor Piazzola.  His music at first outraged the Tango traditionalists, exhibiting as it did pungent dissonance, and rhythmic flexibility. This condemnation by the old guard endeared him to the young and revitalized the Tango.  The Grand Tango for cello and piano contains all the qualities of Piazzolla's music: daring harmonies, spiky dissonance, pulsing rhythm and syncopation, as well as glissandi (slides up and down the fingerboard), strikes to the instrument, and wide mood swings. Though played without pause, the work is comprised of three sections; the first rhythmically strident, alternating moods of violence and tenderness; the second, a lyrical melancholy song of simple texture, and the third a return to the rhythmic insistence of the first, with a wonderful bluesy part for piano, building in tempo and intensity to a grand climax.      Kenneth Olsen

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.