Histoire du Tango

Known as much for his mastery of the bandoneon, a concertina prominent in Argentina and Uruguay, as his compositions, Astor Piazzolla devoted his life to promoting his homeland’s most famous musical style, the tango, as serious concert music. The highly acclaimed Histoire du Tango (1985), originally for acoustic guitar and flute—although it has proven versatile enough to support other instrumentation, particularly marimba or harp for the former and violin for the latter—simultaneously charts the music’s journey from the bordello to the concert hall, while demonstrating its innate sophistication in the notes he put down on the page. The brief work unfolds in four movements tracing its 20th-century history: its spirited roots in 1900 Buenos Aires brothels; its elevation as a music made for listening as much as dancing; its revised urbanity in posh South American nightclubs; and finally its arrival in concert halls, where its lyric qualities collided with the modern sounds of Stravinsky and Bartók.