There are many people here in Buenos Aires who love tango music, but don’t dance. It’s such a complex and varied form of music that it’s possible to enjoy it on many levels. As you know from my posts here, my preference is to dance, but I also love being exposed to other forms. This past week brought two such opportunities.

La Hora del Tango

On Wednesday night Venetia and I went to the Kirchner Cultural Centre to see something called The Hour of Tango, and neither of us was quite sure what it was all about. It turned out that La Hora del Tango is the name of a television series that is currently being produced, and this was the final episode. So the show was being recorded for television, which of course made it a whole different experience. There were takes and retakes, and a great deal of “hurry up and wait”, which stretched the hour out beyond two hours! The process was a bit tedious, but the tango itself was lovely.

A full tango orchestra performed by itself first, and then provided accompaniment for a troupe of at least a dozen dancers. We saw the first dance number twice, as apparently there was a small technical problem at the end, which was fine for the audience but I’m not sure how the dancers felt about it!

We had a couple of tango songs from Chico Navarro, who is very old now but was apparently a very big deal in his day and the audience loved him.

I have no photos of this, because they wouldn’t let us take any because of the television people.

Lola Mora at Bar Celta

One of the Bares Notables I’ve visited for my research was Bar Celta, and I remember reading that they had live music downstairs. Lola recently discovered a whole series called Music at the Bares Notables, and last night we went to see the show downstairs at Bar Celta.

Lola Mora (no relation to my friend Lola!) is a duo of women, one pianist and one violinist, who play a wide range of music but with a specialty in tango. They were fabulous! What musicians they were!

Here’s a short video clip of just one of their songs. This is a famous song called Adios Nonino, by a famous and controversial Argentine tango musician of the fifties called Astor Piazzola. He wrote it after learning that his father had died while he was off on a tour — the title roughly translates as “Goodbye Daddy”. As you can tell from the comments by my friends, it’s a well loved popular favourite.

And just to round things off, tonight I’m off to the milonga to actually dance tango — still my favourite!