PIAZZOLLA: 4 estaciones portenas (Las) / BROUWER: Acerca del cielo, el aire y la sonrisa / ASSAD, S.: Uarekena (EOS Guitar Quartet)

Album review

Even though Astor Piazzolla occasionally composed music for the guitar, a guitar quartet makes a strange medium for the transmission of his major works. The guitarists have to reproduce the percussive aspects of Piazzolla's tangos and also the key structural role played by the timbre of the accordion, all while playing all the notes. The arrangements on this Swiss release, by the members of the Eos Guitar Quartet themselves (each member arranges one of the Cuatro estaciones porteñas or Buenos Aires Four Seasons, with slightly different effects in each case), accomplish these goals, but the musical entities that result are more like variations on Piazzolla than most other classical arrangements of his music. This isn't a bad thing, and the album as a whole provides fresh testimony to the unusually protean quality of Piazzolla's music, but the listener should be prepared for, say, an almost bare opening that builds to an intense climax in which the four guitars are slapped and made to buzz at full blast. The organization of the program is ideal, with the four Piazzolla "seasons" (which were not composed as a single work) framing a variety of other Latin American works that were originally composed for guitars and are more idiomatic to the instrument. This sets off the rather strenuous quality of the Piazzolla pieces. Among the large number of European adaptations of Piazzolla's music, this is one of the more experimental. The music is beautifully recorded, and brief notes are provided in German, English, and French.
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