The Firebird Trio image via Melbourne Recital Centre.
I thought beforehand: what better way to end the working week and to ‘beguile all cares’ than to savour sultry Argentine tangos in the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Salon. This program curated by the Firebird Trio (with guest violinist Curt Thompson, head of strings at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music) featured the very splendid dance duo, Tango Esencia. A smorgasbord of South American and Spanish repertoire was selected to accompany them in five works or movements throughout the recital, each time with costume changes, with the addition of many themed instrumental interludes.
Originating in the 1880s in Argentina and Uruguay, the tango, a partner dance or song or both, was so attractive and startling that it influenced much classical instrumental composition, chamber to orchestral. Similar in rhetorical form to the familiar da capo Baroque aria, the tango is in three parts, the third an impassioned repeat of the first with a contrasting central section. This ongoing, repetitive, cyclic form and what was received as unstructured programming became a significant problem over the 90-minute-long recital without break.
The dance component of this performance was faultless; members of the audience seated in the back rows stood so as to not miss a single moment. Here was tango at its best: silken-smooth and graceful yet underpinned by crisp rhythmic formality, the dancers glided across the floor of the Salon in mesmerising accord with subtle facial and other gestures of supreme tenderness, sometimes a hint of melancholy, all under a halo of affecting refinement and indeed eroticism. If I were to review just the dance, without equivocation this would be a five-star review.
The program differed from the one advertised and featured Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (originally for guitar), a competent performance of Osvaldo Golijov’s Omaramor for cello solo and Joaquín Turina’s lively and dance-inspired Piano Trio No 2 in B minor, Op 76 as the major works. There were other compositions by Alberto Ginastera, Pedro Sáenz, Gerardo Rodríguez, Isaac Albéniz and Heitor Villa-Lobos, though some were disappointingly in unidentified transcriptions or arrangements for piano trio.
An early Argentine baritone of French origin, Carlos Gardel, who tragically perished in an aeroplane disaster in 1935, maintains icon status in tango performance, particularly in Buenos Aires. His famous song Por una cabeza was represented by a curious virtuoso arrangement for violin and piano that seemed to completely, if not scrupulously, avoid any semblance of how Gardel performed the work. I found several other movements in this omnibus program equally lame and out of place. Strangely enough, I witnessed that the Firebird Trio, having performed them, did as well.
To match the quality of the dancing, I found myself instead dreaming of a traditional orquesta típica comprising violins, piano, double bass, and the essential ingredient of at least two bandoneóns providing the necessary grunt, grit and grace to proceedings. One lives to hope.
Rating: 2 1/2 stars out of 5
Firebird Trio – Tango Salon
Presented by Melbourne Recital Centre and Firebird Trio
Friday, 17 February, 2017
Firebird Trio
Curt Thompson, guest violin
Josephine Vains, cello
Benjamin Martin, piano
Tango Esencia
Rina and Nadim Sawaya
