Quartetto »Viva el Tango«

Master of the Tango

Born in Buenos Aires in 1921, Astor Piazzolla had already established himself worldwide as a film composer and chamber musician when he developed Nuevo Tango around 1961 and began travelling the world with his quintet – he himself played the bandoneon – as a »missionary of tango«. His first performances in Germany in the early 1980s were celebrated as a sensation. He had turned the once ridiculed and despised music of the dodgy nightclubs into a great form of contemporary art, enriched with classical harmony and instrumentation, with influences from jazz, baroque music and new music. The traditional »Tangueros« of his homeland threatened him in the streets for this, but the tango only conquered the world thanks to him: Astor Piazzolla.