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With Piazzolla at the Bowl An Historic Event at the Hollywood Bowl Amphitheater

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The concert of Astor Piazzolla’s Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas / The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, at the Hollywood Bowl, on August 26, 2021, was of historic importance. A public of about 15,000 people came to the concert conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, with the performance of Karen Gomio as a soloist.

Astor Piazzolla

Unlike Vivaldi’s concertos, Piazzolla’s Four Seasons wasn’t originally intended to be in four movements.  Piazzolla wrote the first of the four compositions, Summer (Verano Porteño) as a standalone work for Alberto Rodríguez Muñoz’s play The Mane of Gold (Melenita de oro). Autumn (Otoño Porteño), Spring (Primavera Porteña), and Winter (Invierno Porteño) came around five years later, in 1970. Piazzolla alludes to some of Vivaldi’s melodies in his own series, yet his composition is unique. The pieces were conceived for his quintet of violin, piano, electric guitar, double bass, and bandoneon, of which he was a virtuoso.

Conductor Gustavo Dudamel
Violonist Karen Gomio
Pablo Ziegler, Pianist and Composer
Fernando Suárez Paz, Violonist and Conductor
Joanna MacGregor, Pianist and Composer
Daniel Piazzolla, Musician

Piazzolla was not only one of the 20th century’s great musicians, but he was also one of the most prolific. His over 3,000 compositions include avant-garde tango music, opera, symphonic compositios, and music for film.

The concert at the Bowl brought the extraordinary performance of Karen Gomio, a musician born in Tokyo who developed her career in Montreal and New York. She now resides permanently in Berlin.

The coupling of Piazzolla’s Seasons with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 surprised me. It seems to me that the music of Bela Bartok, Stravinsky, Copland, and Gershwin are much closer to his spirit. And also the music of great jazz composers and performers, such as Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck.

In the film I included brief segments of interviews with some musicians that played with him for many years, such as Pablo Ziegler and Fernando Suárez Paz. To learn more about his complex life, Maria Susana Azzi’s detailed and knowledgeable biography is highly recommended, particularly the expanded new edition in Italian.

For brief a scheme of his life, you may watch my recent Piazzolla Con Brio film.

Hollywood Bowl Marquee

 

Spring 21 & Mumuki Plants, Planting and Piazzolla Music

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My short documentary “Spring 2021 & Mumuki” is about plants and planting;

it is about growth, renewal, decay, and death;

it is about being in touch with the land;

it is about Astor Piazzolla’s “Mumuki;”

In the early afternoon of June 3, Ruth asked me to accompany her to the site of a yet-to-be-built permaculture master plan she designed. I said OK. I had no agenda, but I took the Go Pro 6 and the Lumix with me, just in case.

We crossed the recently completed Gateway Bridge over the Long Beach-Los Angeles harbor and reached the site in San Pedro. The contrast with the bridge’s high-tech and 10,000-year-old agriculture was striking. While Ruth helped Peter Rothe, a designer, with his planting, I wandered around.

Growing on a wall
Growing
Cotton
Apples
Decay
Death
Planting

During the weeks since the completion of “Piazzolla Con Brio,” I have been reading Maria Susana Azzi and Simon Collier’s excellent biography of Piazzolla. In it, the composition “Mumuki” is mentioned, which I didn’t know. It sounded Japanese. I went to listen to it. It touched me deeply, differently than other of Piazzolla’s works.

Mumuki was a term of endearment that Piazzolla applied both to his wife, Laura and to one of his dogs, Flora. It is relatively unusual for a work composed for quintet in that the bandoneón is silent during the first three and a half minutes as the beautiful melodic lines are passed between guitar, violin, piano, and bass. When I started to edit the film, I thought of bringing Mumuki into it.

I don’t know what Piazzola may have been thinking or feeling when he composed it. I am sure that it was nothing remotely close to my images, but I felt a link, a kinship. I included it entirely. Mea Culpa.

Piazzolla and Pablo Ziegler, 1984
The Pablo Ziegler Ensamble, 2012
Bandoneon

You may watch two videos of Mumuki’s performances:

  1. By Piazzolla’s Quinteto Nuevo Tango, recorded in 1984:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXjmKmxeuiY

  1. By Pablo Ziegler’s Ensamble, with Karen Gomyo at the violin, recorded in 2012:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK18SiLa24I

Works by Astor Piazzolla:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astor_Piazzolla#Work

 

Piazzolla Con Brio Astor Piazzollas Music, Influences and its Reflection in Architecture

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Many places around the world celebrate this year Astor Piazzolla’s centenary of his birth (1921-1992.) A full-page article published recently in the Los Angeles Times triggered some personal memories about my encounter with Piazzolla when I was seventeen years old. I decided to make a documentary on him, his music, his influence on some contemporary musicians, and some contextual background on Buenos Aires, the tango capital. I also included in the film some works of architecture conceived in a similar spirit to the one that inspired Piazzola’s music. “Piazzolla Con Brio” (Con Brio means in a vigorous or brisk manner in musical vocabulary) sound and images deliver the message more powerfully than this blog. Yet, I’ll bring here a few observations.

Piazzolla Con Brio Documentary – Poster

 

Buenos Aires’ Impact

 

“Three teachers influenced my music,” Piazzolla said. “Alberto Ginastera, Nadia Boulanger, and Buenos Aires.” Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) was a leading 20th-century Latin-American composer known for his use of local and national musical idioms in his compositions. Piazzolla, his first student, studied for six years with him. Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979,) conductor, organist, and one of the most influential teachers of musical composition of the 20th century, helped Piazzolla to find his voice. And Buenos Aires helped Piazzolla to become a Porteño, the way are called the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. 

 

Buenos Aires molds the identity of its inhabitants, who see themselves as more European than Latin American. Italy exerts the most potent cultural influence, but Buenos Aires is a complex place that includes great architecture, art and has more bookstores per habitant than any other city in the world. Its people are also passionate about soccer, meat, pizza, wine, ethnic food, and, yes, tango. 

Buenos Aires Boulevard
Traditional Building in Buenos Aires
Bife de Lomo (Fillet Mignon)
River vs. Boca
Naturalis Labor Dance Company dancing Piazzolla’s Music

 

As a young bandoneonist, Piazzolla started playing traditional tango in the orchestra of Anibal Troilo, a composer, arranger, and bandleader. However, studying with Ginastera, he abandoned the bandoneon and decided to become a symphonic composer. He returned to the tango as a source of inspiration following Nadia Boulanger’s advice. 

 

Although Piazzola spent many years of his life living in New York and Paris, Buenos Aires’ lifestyle exerted on his identity was crucial.

 

Buenos Aires’ Architecture 

 

The population of Greater Buenos Aires is today about 15,000,000. The capital consists of 48 official barrios or neighborhoods, many of these having a strong local identity. The city’s original architecture was strongly influenced by French and Italian neo-classical architecture. It evolved into Modernism under French architect Le Corbusier, who built many of his main works in exposed concrete. One of the city’s most prominent architects, Clorindo Testa (1923-2013,) about the same age as Piazzolla, designed and built two important buildings: the Bank of London, now called the Banco Hipotecario, completed in 1966, and the National Library, completed in 1992.

 

Two concepts characterize the uniqueness of the National Library. The first lies in the idea of the strength of the part that lifts the reading rooms above the ground, burying the deposits of books underground. The second concept lies in the strength and monumentality of the building in the vicinity of existing parks. 

 

A minor but poetic work I bring to the film is the Xul Solar Museum, designed by architect Pablo Tomas Beitia and completed in 1993. Alejandro Xul Solar (1887-1963) was an Argentinean painter, sculptor, and writer. The over one hundred years old building that faces the street was his residence. The renovation and expansion project was designed to interpret the particular artist’s pictorial world.

 

Floralis Genérica is a sculpture made of steel and aluminum, a gift of architect Eduardo Catalano (1917-2010). The sculpture was created in 2002. It was designed to move, closing its petals in the evening and opening them in the morning.

 

The former Grand Splendid Theater was designed by architects Peró and Torres Armengol and opened in 1919. In 2000 the building was subsequently renovated and converted into a book and music shop under the direction of architect Fernando Manzone. It’s been called the world’s most beautiful bookstore.

 

These five architectural examples relate to Piazzolla’s music in a number of ways. Clorindo Testa’s bank and library express energy and strength; the Xul Solar Museum and the Ateneo Grand Splendid bring a reinterpretation of the old with a new language; Floralis Generica tells of the creative interpretation of a flower.

Bank of London (Now Banco Hipotecario)Photo: Federico Cairoli
Bank of London – DetailPhoto: Federico Cairoli
Bank of London – DetailPhoto: Federico Cairoli
Xul Solar Paintings
Xul Solar Paintings
Xul Solar Museum
Xul Solar Museum
Floralis Generica
Floralis Generica
Floralis Generica
El Ateneo Splendid Bookstore
El Ateneo Splendid Bookstore
El Ateneo Splendid Bookstore
El Ateneo Splendid Bookstore

 

Porteño

 

The film includes an abridged version of a poem I wrote in 1988, Porteño. It portrays how I then saw some aspects of my upbringing. You may read the unabridged version rolling down towards the end on http://meghiddoarchitects.com/selected-poems/ .

Astor Piazzolla