Page 22 - Phil 2024-2025 opening night digital program

seem heavy: your arms embracing me formerly in the night.” Venezuelan conductor
Eduardo Marturet’s lyrical arrangement of Oblivion (premiered in 2001 with the
arranger conducting the Miami Symphony Orchestra) presents Piazzolla’s central
theme as lush and harmonically sophisticated; the song’s original text discusses a
slowly danced duet which blurred into a forgotten memory.

Astor Piazzolla, the most prolific composer of tango music, spent his formative years
in lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village and Little Italy). The son of an Italian barber
who emigrated to Argentina, he listened avidly to his father’s records of the tango
orchestras of Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro. During his teens in New York City, he was
exposed to jazz and classical music, including Bach. At the age of eight, he began to
play the bandoneón, an Argentinian version of the European accordion, developing into
an expert player and composer for the instrument.

The bandoneón (also spelled bandonion), named for the German instrument dealer
Heinrich Band (1821-1860), was originally intended as an accompanying instrument for
small-group religious and popular music, in contrast to the folk concertina in Germany.
Around 1870, the instrument appeared in Argentina and was adopted into milonga and
tango music. By 1910, they were produced expressly for the Argentine and Uruguayan
markets, with 25,000 shipping to Argentina in 1930 alone. Aníbal Troilo and Ástor
Piazzolla wrote extensively for the bandoneón in the 1930s-40s; the disruption of
German manufacturing during World War II led to a rapid decline in the manufacture
of bandoneóns, accordions, and harmonicas. Modern arrangers pass melodies originally
intended for the reedy-voices accordion to a variety of wind instruments, with the oboe
being closest in sonority to Piazzolla’s intended original sound.
He played in tango orchestras and quintets in Mar de Plata, Argentina (1936-38), then
moved to Buenos Aires as a featured player and arranger for Anibal Troilo’s legendary
tango orchestra (1938-46). Piazzolla was inspired by the music of Stravinsky and Bartók
while studying with composer Alberto Ginastera and founded his own Orquesta Típica,
composing the first of over 500 published tango compositions. After a year of study in
Paris with Nadia Boulanger (1954-55), he developed a new jazz-influenced instrumental
chamber music style he called “nuevo tango.”

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An American in Paris George Gershwin
(1898-1937)

George Gershwin was a notable composer and jazz pianist based in New York City
whose popular music has featured in notable films such as Funny Face and Gene Kelly’s
1951 film pastiche American in Paris. The 1928 tone poem heard tonight is featured at
the end of the film, accompanying an extensive ballet which marries the vibrant sounds
of Parisian streets and dance halls (danced in ragtime and jazz styles by Leslie Caron
and Gene Kelly) with tender, sweeping melodies (more balletic movement, in front of
French impressionist paintings). As Gershwin succinctly put it: “It’s not intended to draw

20 Plymouth Philharmonic O r ches tr a
20 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra