Dino Saluzzi: Imágenes – Music for piano / Horacio Lavandera
ECM New Series 2379 player
Imágenes features premiere recordings of Dino Saluzzi’s music for piano. The pieces gathered together here, written between 1960 and 2002, were variously conceived in Salta and Buenos Aires and on the road. Periodically, the great bandoneonist has set aside the instrument which has accompanied him for more than seven decades, to find expression by other means. Over the years, of course, he has written the most diverse music for ensembles of many kinds, including chamber music for his Kultrum collaboration with the Rosamunde Quartett, pieces for duo with classical cellist Anja Lechner, and works for orchestra performed and recorded with the Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam’s Musiekgebouw. On Imagénes, Horacio Lavandera, a gifted Argentine pianist specialized in both classical music and contemporary composition – he studied with Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen, and has collaborated with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel – proves to be an ideal Saluzzi interpreter, attuned both to his love of his homeland and his artistic need to travel widely.
Lavandera recorded these pieces, under the supervision of the composer, and with Manfred Eicher as producer, at Oslo’s Rainbow studio in October 2013. The album is issued in time for Dino Saluzzi’s 80th birthday on May 20.
Dino Saluzzi was born in 1935 in the Northwest Argentine province of Salta. He learned music in the context of his family, firstly. “We didn’t get any information through the radio or through albums, there wasn’t any knowledge of academic music or symphonic music or formal concerts. But my father was able to transmit a musical education to me.” Later there were more conventional studies. As a highly accomplished bandoneonist he later conquered the concert halls around the world and played a decisive role in elevating the tango inside and beyond the vogue for so-called world music. Yet the tango is but one component of his “integrative” composing. As Pablo Márquez, a classical musician who also grew up in Salta remarks, “Dino never allows himself to be become trapped in one aesthetic; he is always somewhere unexpected. One of his favourite utterances – “la música es una” (music is one) – is a good illustration of his position, beyond all frontiers between styles, genres, and aesthetics. Even if some archetypal figures of traditional Argentine music are present here and there in this collection of piano pieces, like a common thread (notably in Los recuerdos, Montañas, Media noche, Donde nací…), his boundless curiosity opens up entirely new perspectives to us.” Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, in the liner notes, makes a similar point suggesting that Saluzzi’s musical pictures, heard via the piano, take on an almost cubist quality, like a sequence of images viewed from multiple angles.
Saluzzi has long been able to accommodate “a plurality of voices” in his music. On ECM he has been heard performing music of Giya Kancheli alongside Gidon Kremer (Themes from the Songbook), his own albums have frequently featured jazz players (Charlie Haden, Palle Mikkelborg, Palle Danielsson, Marc Johnson, Jon Christensen etc.) and he also toured and recorded with Tomasz Stanko (From the Green Hill). In spring 2015 he is on tour with his son Jose Maria Saluzzi, his brother Felix Saluzzi, and his nephew Mathias Saluzzi – all members of the family band which made the album El Valle de la Infancia. Each of these contexts can tell but part of the story.
Saluzzi, an independent musical thinker, appears in two recent music films Sounds & Silence (2009), directed by Peter Guyer, Norbert Wiedmer and El Encuentro: A film for bandoneon and violoncello (2012), directed by Norbert Wiedmer and Enrique Ros.
Horacio Lavandera (born 1984), is an honorary professor at the University of the Argentine city of Rosario. He made his first recording at the age of 16, playing Mozart, Berg and Ginastera, and quickly established himself as a brilliant and lucid piano player with a large, and versatile repertoire. He has performed as a soloist with many orchestras, including the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg, Filarmonica della Scala, Orquesta de la Accademia Nazionale diSanta Cecilia, London Chamber Pleyers, YOA Orchestra of the Americas, Orquestra do Norte of Portugal, Orquesta Sinfónica de la Ciudad de Oviedo, Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires, Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Argentina, and the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa.
CD booklet includes liner notes by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich and Pablo Marquez, and photos from the Imagénes recording session.
