Daniel Barenboim, who recently received Gramophone’s Lifetime Achievement Award, turns 80 on November 15th. He is now especially associated with Berlin, but he was born in Buenos Aires. “I spent the first nine years of my life in Argentina and only in Argentina,” he has said. “The air that I breathed was Buenos Aires, and the rhythm to which I danced (figuratively speaking…) was the tango … In Argentina in the late 1940s there was no chasm between classical music and the tango … Already as a child I was crazy about the tango. I still am.” This LP of Tangos from Buenos Aires is a reconfiguration of an album originally released in 1996. Barenboim is joined by two tango specialists he met when he was visiting Argentina with the Berlin Staatskapelle: bandoneón player Rodolfo Mederos and bassist Héctor Console. “What they gave me,” says Barenboim, “was a pure sense of the tango, especially in the melodic freedom over a very strict rhythmic foundation.” The trio performs music by, among others, the two kings of tango, Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzolla, and by Alberto Ginastera, best known as a composer of sensational modernist operas.
