“I still can’t believe that some pseudo-critics continue to accuse me of having murdered tango,” Astor Piazzolla once declared. “They have it backward. They should look at me as the saviour of tango. I performed plastic surgery on it.”Thirty-three years after his death, and 70 years after he created the “new tango” – fusing the sensual dance form with such disparate elements as New York jazz, Buenos Aires dirt and baroque counterpoint – admirers including Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim continue to hail Piazzolla’s transformative influence. Hence the anticipation around the forthcoming Read more ...

James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a spectrum of pieces which brim with wit and inventiveness. This lunchtime concert with violinist Anthony Marwood was a sheer joy, as they together traversed a range of style and tone, richly entertaining a very decent Bank Holiday crowd in the Wigmore Hall.The starting point was an obvious one: the tangos of Astor Piazzolla. This sequence of three run together had a reassuring familiarity, and a strong whiff of the Parisian café. The swooning violin melody Read more ...

Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis hasn’t made large waves this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps this is because her appeal has partly been rooted in Latin communities across the US and, indeed, Central and South America. Last year her third album, Red Moon in Venus, reached the Top 5 of the US album charts. At the time she said she already had her next album ready, a Spanish language affair. This is it and it’s a slightly feistier creature than its woozily narcotic predecessor.Uchis’s current default setting remains sexy-stoned. Her voice is a seductive instrument. She silkily rolls language Read more ...

One of the many theatrical casualties of Omicron in December was the official UK opening of Moulin Rouge!, the stage version of Baz Luhrmann’s indelible 2001 film that has already racked up 10 Tony Awards for its 2019 Broadway production (albeit in a depleted season). Thankfully, the show is now back at full strength, and, if anything, its explosion of song, colour and eye-popping spectacle is even more welcome during these grey January days.Once again, we’re entering the fantasy that is the Moulin Rouge nightclub in fin de siècle Paris, where the show’s star, courtesan Satine (Liisi Read more ...

 Sverre Indris Joner: Con cierto toque de tango Henning Kraggerud (violin), Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Sverre Indris Joner, with Tango for 3 (Lawo Classics)Sverre Indris Joner is described in this disc’s notes as “the doyen of Latin American music in Norway”. Besides composing, playing, teaching and researching, he’s also found the time to act, illustrate and write plays. The Finnish love for Argentinian tango is well-documented; presumably Norwegians are also getting in on the act. Joner himself writes about the challenges of orchestrating and arranging tangos, and his solutions are Read more ...

If there’s a downside to the resurgence of vinyl, it’s that all that’s left in most charity shops these days is James Galway and his cursed flute and Max Bygraves medley albums. Then again, there’s always new stuff coming in so it’s down to everybody to get in there quick, before the local record shops hoover up all the gems. And there it is. Many small towns now have local record shops again. That’s surely something to celebrate. There’s even a Vinyl Festival this September in Rotherhithe [Notification 20.7.2017: This event has been cancelled] with a hundred stalls featuring independent Read more ...

Watching tango dancers Gisela Galeassi and Nikito Cornejo own the apron of the stage during the second half of m¡longa, the brain finds it difficult to process what the eyes are seeing. The pair seem to be one writhing, dark-toned dervish of jutting, sensual, passionate movement. Back and forth they go, he spinning her round his body like a silk scarf, fluid as mercury; her feet attacking the stage, staccato, kicking out, kicking down, so fast it really is the proverbial blur. Nigh on two hours of tango with a 20-minute interval might sound like too much, but with only the smallest of lulls Read more ...

 Grainger: Works for Large Chorus and Orchestra Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)Here's a welcome postscript to Chandos’s mammoth Grainger Edition – one of the best, wackiest box sets out there. This new anthology of rarities for chorus and orchestra has the added advantage of having been recorded in Melbourne, and the performances are consistently successful. The works themselves are of variable quality though; Grainger’s output could be maddeningly inconsistent. Here, the high spots are magnificent. Few composers were such brilliant arrangers, and Grainger can Read more ...

Cesaria Evora was one of the great singers, her lived-in voice and poignant, heart-wrenching music affecting nearly all who heard it. She had been in poor health after a heart attack in 2008 and a stroke last year, and died on the island of São Vicente in Cape Verde where she was born. I had the honour and pleasure of meeting her in Lisbon in 2001, on the occasion of the release of one of her best albums, São Vicente Di Longe. She seemed hugely modest and rather amazed at the fact that she had become a global star. I started by talking to her manager, José Da Silva.José Da Read more ...

This was a programme born for marketing cliché: banish the winter blues by bathing in Latin American/Iberian warmth. And it turned out to be true, by virtue of an unexpected watershed. How did the BBC Symphony strings manage to be first among the London orchestras to slip into something truly sensual, whether tangoing with an Argentinian bandoneónist - "A what?" you may ask, and I'll tell you shortly - or dancing malagueñas with a Spanish pianist? Was it the after-effect of the John Wilson Hollywood treatment last Sunday, or just sheer joy in welcoming back the high, bright style of conductor Read more ...

The first phrase of the first piece by Georges Enescu - silken, expressive, rounded, breathed to perfection - established a very good case for Håkan Hardenberger being the greatest living trumpeter. The rest of his Wigmore Hall recital established a pretty equally watertight case against.Probably the most impressive thing about the impressively impassioned account of Enescu's great single-movement tone poem Légende was Hardenberger's control of dynamic at both ends of the spectrum. The expressive feel and sweep of this late-Romantic work was perfectly communicated by both Hardenberger and Read more ...

Strange listening to Sadler’s Wells chief Alistair Spalding timidly defending “cutting-edge” dance on yesterday’s Radio 4 arts debate - having just been to the current SWT dance show, Tanguera. Supposedly giving a smash-hit new international spin on tango (it comes warmly endorsed by its patron Daniel Barenboim), Tanguera is no more than a tepid dansical in soft-focus sub-West End style, with some not great dancing and the kind of dramaturgy that belongs back in the 19th century in dubious improving pamphlets for young women.I am tired and offended by those box-office chestnuts where the Read more ...