Astor Piazzolla died in 1992, just as his music was beginning to surf the wave of popularity that still shows no sign of losing energy. In the decade after his death the Argentinian's tangos appeared in all manner of arrangements. There must be many who have been bowled over by his music but are unaware of where it came from, and how it was originally conceived. For those admirers, as well as the rest of us who only know the original performances from discs, the Quinteto Piazzolla provides the last, priceless link to the world that Piazzolla inhabited.
The quintet is led by guitarist Horacio Esteban Malvicino, who played in the various incarnations of Piazzolla's group from 1954 until the composer's death; both violinist Fernando Nestor Suarez-Paz and double bass player Hector Lorenzo Console were also members of the line-up that produced some of Piazzolla's greatest recordings. They are partnered by pianist Nicolas Angel Ledesma and bandoneon player Nestor Eude Marconi, and it is Marconi who has perhaps the hardest task of all, for the bandoneon, the specifically Argentinian form of the accordion, was Piazzolla's own instrument.
The results are electrifying. The quintet's raw, uncomplicated sound restores to the music its sense of danger and urban roots, qualities that are too often smothered in many of the well-meaning but over-genteel, over-reverential arrangements for the concert hall. However sophisticated Piazzolla's rhythmic invention, however intense his melodic writing and telling his harmonic palette, his reinventions of the tango never lost their sense of where they belonged.
It was not all nostalgia. To underline that link between Piazzolla's generation and the musicians of today pianist Joanna MacGregor and accordionist James Crabb joined Malvicino, Console and Suarez-Paz for the first set of the evening. Macgregor provided the alert, ever inventive backdrop, but it was Crabb who caught the attention with a series of solos that had such instinctive phrasing and comprehensive awareness of the music's expressive potential, it was hard to believe that he hadn't been playing this music for years in Buenos Aires.
