The cover photo tells all: a startled but beautiful young girl in a split-side dress balancing awkwardly on high heels as an older man nestles lovingly into her neck. She holds a cigarette and gazes at the camera as someone seated nearby strums his guitar. It is a melancholy image: seedy, sad, but sensually vibrant. Once again Gidon Kremer paints a parallel musical picture through a haunting sequence of tangos. His ongoing crusade on Piazzolla’s behalf has spawned a rare musical species, carried on a cross-wind somewhere between northern chill and the sultry south.
Tango Ballet is the work of Leonid Desyatnikov (instrumental architect for Kremer’s Maria de Buenos Aires, 11/98 – also on Teldec) and occupies five movements, opening among aggressive syncopations, then softening to a more lyrical line with a shimmering accompaniment. The fourth movement, a finger-snapping ‘Cabaret’, is the most carefree, but the rest is sometimes so painfully expressive that it occasionally seems as if Shostakovich, even Schnittke, are busy scribbling in the wings, passing on fragments of their own ideas.
Rolf Gupta’s transcription of Concierto del Angel smuggles a bandoneon among violin, piano, double-bass and string orchestra, with a fugal ‘La muerte del angel’. Another fugue (marked Allegro) is at the centre of Jose Bragato’s Tres piezas para orquesta de camara, which also harbours a powerfully insistent opening ‘Preludio’.
The playing of Kremerata Baltica displays tireless energy and Kremer himself bends the musical line as easily as Grappelli did with jazz. It is a real meeting of disparate musical worlds, with echoes (intentional or not) of Weill, Revueltas, Villa-Lobos, even Stravinsky. The sum effect suggests the triumph of music over suffering, pain suddenly eased and the release born of bursting into song and dance. You can take it to your heart in private, or fill the room with it at a party. Piazzolla via Kremer would surely be satisfied with either option.'