Last tango in Manila

You’ve probably heard Astor Piazzolla’s music, even if you didn’t realize it: his Nuevo Tango themes have found their way into films like Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, among others.

His reinvention of Argentina’s national music was radical, to say the least. By orchestrating his music for octets, adding baroque and jazz elements, Piazzolla performed heart surgery on the tango. Where once it was stately and formal, a vehicle for the dancers’ legs, he did a bypass, adding new ventricles of passion and intimacy, dissonance and improvisation.

Manila audiences got a treat when ArtistVenture brought Piazzolla: Not Only Tango to Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium at RCBC Plaza for two shows last week (a third and final show was held at UP Los Baños on April 7). Mixing dance and a chamber orchestra of violin, viola, guitar, cello and piano, the show presented 10 Piazzolla pieces in a very intimate, sometimes quirky setting: dancers Zie (Singaporean founder of Tango Lyrical) and Russian champion tango partner Asmik Akopyan accompanied the pieces in a series of slinky, playful duets onstage. Akopyan, with her liquid legs wrapped sexily around Zie, brought an authentic swoon to the music of the Argentinean master of Nuevo Tango.

Opening the program were two non-Piazzolla pieces — Gardel’s Por Una Cabeza, which is instantly recognizable as the tango that blind Al Pacino sways to with Gabrielle Anwar in Scent of a Woman; followed by Rodriguez’s La Cumparsita. Both are familiar, but decidedly of the “old tango” school. After that, a block of Piazzolla creates the proper mood: Primavera Porteña, Verano Porteño, Oblivion, followed by a terrific solo tango for guitar by Filipino player Gladwin Pantastico (the UST-trained classical guitarist was “discovered” by this ensemble’s creative director, Armenian celloist Gevorg Sargsyan, in Singapore and has since joined them on tour).

There were bits of absurdist whimsy in the progam, such as the sight of Sargsyan wandering aimlessly at the back of the stage during Piazzolla’s Night Club, and the bit where Zie dropped down into the audience to include a female patron in a spotlighted tango as the group played behind them. A disco ball added to the romantic, swoony quality of the music. Vocalist Gayane Vardanyan added a classical, somewhat eerie touch to the composer’s Ave Maria; and of course things wrapped up with the entire orchestra racing through Libertango, perhaps Piazzolla’s most-performed piece.

It’s interesting how Piazzolla’s music has transcended time: 20 years after his death, it seems to be performed more than ever. Piazzolla himself was a tireless exponent of Nuevo Tango (despite occasional death threats from fellow Argentinians for “desecrating” the tango), and recorded his own works in dozens of settings; but the arrangements are so key to the music’s mood, you can’t mess around with them too much. Fortunately, the ArtistVenture troupe respected this.

Talking with Sargsyan and Pantastico after the show, we learn that the young Filipino guitarist is originally from Los Baños, so their next stop there is a kind of homecoming. Sargsyan adds: “I’m personally excited to play in Los Baños, because we’re used to playing in big halls, big cities, we’ve never really reached out to the provinces. It will be interesting to see their reaction.”

Pantastico studied classical guitar at UST, and found the transition to Piazzolla’s music a little challenging: “It’s very interesting for me, but Piazzolla’s music also has a lot of electric guitar, which was a bit of a problem to jump to that” as a classical guitarist.

Sargsyan says the troupe — which includes members from Russia, Armenia, the Philippines, Bulgaria and Singapore — “wanted to highlight the classical part of Piazzolla, because he improvises a lot, so we wanted to focus it more on the classical part of it, but present it not only in a classical way.”  

The audience was a little sparser than one would have liked for this Saturday night performance — though I prefer to think of the C.P. Romulo Auditorium as half full, rather than half empty.