Astor Piazzolla : Si l'orchestre m'était conté

Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ is at once the most familiar and the least well known piece of Western classical music: while isolated motifs and melodies have been rendered trite through overuse in TV ads and the like, people rarely go to the effort of listening to the  four-concerto cycle in its entirety. One man who certainly did, and went one further by writing his own homage to the piece, is Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla. Credited with taking tango out of the dance hall and into the concert venue, Piazzolla was one of the most innovative and prolific musicians ever to come out of his country, and his mournful harmonies and impassioned bandoneon are inextricably associated with the porteño culture of Buenos Aires. Fitting, then, that his ‘Estaciones Porteñas’ replaces the bucolic metaphors of Vivaldi’s music with something more gritty, more urban.