Dos tangos / Two tangos

a) For violin, accordion, cello, double bass, and piano
b) For clarinet, two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and piano


Commentary
Recording
Video
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Commentary

Among the many curious commissions I have received, the one I got in 2010 from a group called "Tango Quintet La Zerilla" shines brightly. The group consisted of a violin, accordion, cello, double bass, and piano. Formed in 2005 within the environment of the Aragon Conservatory of Music, it was made up of five young performers, with my son Guillermo as the cellist among them. Their repertoire focused on the music of Astor Piazzolla, but they wanted to expand it by requesting some composers to write a new piece for such a peculiar ensemble, which would in any case be directly or indirectly related to tango.

The Tango Quintet La Zerilla performs Astor Piazzolla's Invierno porteño.

This last circumstance, along with Guillermo being part of the group, led me to look back thirteen years to when I composed a set of Three dances for his chamber music training and that of his brother Luis, a violinist. A Tango occupied the central movement. In the following years, I made several versions of it for different ensembles to enrich the repertoire for Chamber music teaching in the new professional grade of music education, which did not exist in the intermediate level of the previous curriculum. I revisited it for the new piece requested by the La Zerilla quintet and proceeded to rework it, interweaving it with a second tango so that the stanzas of one and the other would alternate, thus creating marked contrasts due to their very different characters. The resulting piece was consequently titled Two Tangos.
I ended up being the only composer who wrote for them, as -as has happened to me on other occasions with other groups- the quintet dissolved shortly after the piece was completed without premiering it, leaving the original version of these Two Tangos unpublished until now. However, its life did not end there, as a year later I received a commission from the National Center for Musical Diffusion to compose a piece for a concert featuring various types of dances, to be performed by the Sonor Ensemble in the 2011-2012 season. Adapted to the new ensemble (clarinet and piano sextet), the Two Tangos became the first movement of the Intertwined dances (the second is called Pot-pourri), which premiered on May 20, 2012, in the Hall 400 of the "Reina Sofía" Museum in Madrid. In this new and -so far- final version, the Two Tangos can be performed as an independent piece, as it was indeed premiered on April 24, 2012, in the Paraninfo of the Faculty of Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, by the Sonor Ensemble under the direction of Luis Aguirre.

Recording

Recording: Sonor Ensemble (Dir.: Luis Aguirre)

Vídeo

Sonor Ensemble (Dir.: Luis Aguirre)

Download pdfs

(Scores and parts without watermarks available at www.asesores-musicales.com )

Score of the version for violin, accordion, cello, double bass, and piano of the Two tangos

Score of the version for clarinet and piano sextet of the Two tangos, as the first movement of the Intertwined dances