Marco Albonetti Plays The Music of Piazzolla

Chronique

The music of Astor Piazzolla, rather like Bach's, is amenable to realizations in a variety of instrumental media, and since the hit recordings by Gidon Kremer and company, it has been subjected to many orchestral and chamber treatments. This release from saxophonist Marco Albonetti comes with an endorsement by Piazzolla keyboardist and nuevo tango giant Pablo Ziegler, and it's hard to imagine that Piazzolla himself, who grew up amidst New York jazz, would have objected to it much. Except for the one by Ziegler of Oblivion, the arrangements for saxophone and orchestra are Albonetti's. Piazzolla was not a jazz artist; what he and his accompanying musicians played was specified in one way or another. Yet, with his mix of a fixed rhythmic basis and melodic elaboration, he was a kindred spirit to jazz. Albonetti seems to emphasize the blurred genre lines by introducing Ziegler's Oblivion arrangement with a genuine jazz improvisation, both pointing up the non-jazz nature of the rest of the pieces and making clear the continuity of mood. The simpler pieces, allowing Albonetti to flaunt his beautiful tone work best here; try Años de Soledad, a bit less familiar than the other pieces, where he plays a baritone saxophone. The Cuatro estaciones porteñas (The Four "Port City" Seasons, or Buenos Aires Four Seasons), have to transfer their more chordal and polyphonic bandoneon parts to the saxophone and orchestra somehow; they break up the pieces' basic forms, and to these ears don't always put them together again. Nowhere, however, is Albonetti's album less than stimulating, and it's often beautiful. It will certainly find a place in Piazzolla collections.
© James Manheim /TiVo