Cadogan Hall; Royal Albert Hall, London
Two proms celebrated the rich music of Astor Piazzolla in contrasting but illuminating ways
The centenary of Astor Piazzolla’s birth falls this year, an anniversary marked by a pair of Proms, notably different in their approach. At Monday’s Cadogan Hall concert, guitarist Sean Shibe, mezzo Wallis Giunta and flautist Adam Walker placed Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango, for flute and guitar, alongside a scene from his “operita” María de Buenos Aires and songs by fellow Argentinian composer Ariel Ramírez, also born in 1921.
Written in 1986, and juxtaposing sensuality with something of the contrapuntal purity of Bach, Histoire du Tango charts the dance’s evolution from its fin-de-siècle origins in the brothels of Buenos Aires via cafes and nightclubs to the bravura “Concert d’aujourd’hui” with which it ends. Walker and Shibe did fine things with it, offsetting beauty with ferocity and combining virtuosity with exquisite tenderness and grace.