Off to Buenos Aires with Tomas Cotik

Piazzolla—Buenos Aires: Arrangements for Violin and String Orchestra Tomas Cotik, violin. Martingale Ensemble/Ken Selden Naxos 8.574308 Total Time:  62:14 Recording:   ****/**** Performance: ****/****

After surveying music of Telemann and Bach for unaccompanied violin the past couple years, Tomas Cotik turns his attention to the music of Piazzolla.  This is his third collection of the composer’s music for the Naxos label.  This time the selections pay homage to Cotik’s home city, Buenos Aires.  Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) was a composer whose blend of international styles into the tango elevated that art form.  His music began to gain a wider interest in the classical world especially towards the end of his life.  He is most known for the many recordings he made with his Quinteto Nuevo tango.  Many of his pieces have been transcribed for various ensembles and as solo works.  This album features some new arrangements of seven shorter works coupled with Piazzolla’s take on The Four Seasons.

Conductor Ken Selden is behind the new violin and string arrangements that populate this album.  They are adapted from the published scores with an ear toward the often with improvised performances of Piazzolla’s ensemble.  Chin Chin (1978-79) gets things off to an exciting start with its repeated 4-note motive underneath a virtuosic solo violin line zipping about with its melodic inflections.  Resurreccion del Angel (1965), the earliest piece on the album, slows things down with a beautiful, somewhat passionate lyrical line followed by an equally gorgeous idea.  There is some wonderful interaction here with cello.  Mumuki (1984), the latest work on the album, moves us into equally compelling melodic writing.  Each of these shorter pieces reveals Piazzolla’s rich harmonic language within a semi-romantic style.  The arrangements here, and in the moving Soledad (1968), the “Zita” from Suite Troileana (1975), Celos (1979), and the last track’s Fugata (1969) provide a great window into the wide variety of the composer’s melodic creation.  They also allow Tomas Cotik to shine with their blends of angular and virtuosic melodic segments that fly by, while also allowing plenty of rich, lyrical phrasing.  The performances here allow for an engaging energy where appropriate and move to more personal, achingly beautiful playing of the slower melodic ideas.  The heartfelt connection to these pieces comes through very well in Cotik’s excellent performances here.

Leonid Desyatnikov’s arrangement of Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas (or the Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) is based on a famous 1970 concert that introduced these four pieces with Piazzolla’s quintet for a recording.  This work is now often programmed as part of concerts with the Vivaldi concerti.  There are some Vivaldi quotations strewn throughout and it allows for an intriguing mixture of the Baroque and the Tango.  Cotik manages these, often sudden shifts, stunningly in this performance with solid performance from the ensemble here.  There are a variety of recordings of this work but this is a solid addition to the catalogue.

The recording was made in June 2022 in Oregon and the ensemble here proves to be quite adept at bringing out the rhythmic inflections of this music very well.  There is also a quite full sound that comes through with the rich harmonic moments that provide support under Cotik’s solo lines.  This is due in part to Selden’s fine arrangements for the shorter pieces here.  The sound is equally accomplished, placing the soloist front and center with the ensemble imaged well across the sound spectrum here.

Piazzolla’s music has a very infectious quality that is an often fascinating blend of modernist and popular gestures and writing.  It is this quality that makes it quite endearing to fans of his music and this album will certainly be one to enjoy and treasure.