El Ultimo Tango concert

Eduardo Vassallo

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For the last in its 2012-13 series of subscription concerts the Rochdale Music Society brought to the Heywood Civic Centre the group El Ultimo Tango - a quintet created by Eduardo Vassallo, Principal Cello of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, in 2002.

This ensemble specialises in Argentinian music with particular emphasis on the music of Astor Piazzolla (1921-92), who devoted so much of his life’s work to turning the tango into a respectable art form worthy of gracing the serious concert hall platform.

The idiosyncratic combination of acerbic musical wit and delicately balanced sentimentality to be experienced in Piazzolla’s music is what gives it the power to attract and retain the attention of an audience for the duration of a typical concert programme length.

Despite its tendency to rely quite heavily Baroque melodic and harmonic forms (or perhaps because of it?) it is always indicative of its age: the mid to late 1900s when competing artistic claims to ‘originality’ and ‘integrity’ littered those decades with extremist pretensions.

Some pieces are clearly very much indebted to Bach and/or Chopin. But, like VIlla Lobos's tributes to Bach or Dave Brubeck's tribute to Chopin's C minor Nocturne, the later composer's personality is stamped Picasso-like on the earlier; challenging the listener to open the ears wider to the resonances of the past. Reminiscent of late Ravel.

The use of electronic amplification of the violin and cello, which emphasised the cutting edge of the music, was a sore point for some of the otherwise very attentive and appreciative audience. 

This concert was sponsored by the Rochdale Music Society’s Chairman, Shirley Mitchell, and her daughter Anna. Shirley, who will be a sprightly 80 in June, chose to use this occasion to invite her many friends to join her in a celebration of her long association with Rochdale and its Music Society since her arrival in these parts from the New England state of Maine.