Monday, March 05, 2007
Sexteto Mayor at the IX Buenos Aires Tango Festival
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Ok, what I said in the last entry about the outdoor milonga being cancelled due to rain turned out to not be entirely true. At the last minute it was moved to the massive indoor performance space at La Rural. I heard about this change only after the Fernández Fierro concert, where the news was announced on hand-written signs pasted to the windows of the box office. Since the bus we needed to get back to our neighborhood went directly to La Rural, we decided to go check it out.
We missed the first band entirely, the Orquesta Típica Cerda Negra, and caught only the last two songs of the second, the Orquesta Típica Sans Souci. This second band was noteworthy for, among other things, having the same singer as the Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro, the fantastic Walter “Chino” Laborde, whom we had just seen performing on the other side of town not more than an hour ago. (And in Buenos Aires the other side of town means the other side of town: it took us more than 45 minutes on a dangerously fast bus to get from one show to the other.) With Fernández Fierro, Laborde sang wearing a black kimono and an opaque face mask with an electric blue wig gathered in pigtails. With Sans Souci, which is a much, much, much more traditional kind of orquesta, Laborde wore a three piece beige suit cut in a 1930s style and black wing tips with his hair slicked back like Carlos Gardel. And the band was finishing their set when we showed up!
The evening’s headlining band was the famed Sexteto Mayor, a group formed in the 1970s that has been one of the major torch bearers of traditional tango since that time. They have toured the world with many of the broadway-style shows such as “Tango Argentino.” These shows are largely responsible for re-igniting international interest in the genre in the 1980s and 1990s, and local events like the tango festival have benefited from their success and are in many ways designed to take advantage of it. The band itself has seen a lot of changes over the years, including the deaths of several of their founding members. Their pianist, Oscar Palermo, passed away just last month and has been replaced by Cristian Zárate, at least for now. Aside from Zárate, the band featured a mix of old guard and new guard performers, including relatively young bandoneonist Pablo Mainetti and very young Horacio Romo, the latter of whom was serving as the group’s musical director. Romo, who (I believe) is only 28, has certainly made it. I saw him play with Rubén Juárez at the opening concert of the festival, and here he was leading the band that was headlining the closing event, and leading it with confidence and poise. His playing, too, is top notch, as was that of the band as a whole, though I don’t know if they exactly get your pulse going. It depends on what you want from tango, I suppose. The Sexteto, like all of the groups that I saw play at La Rural during the festival, seemed to struggle against the acoustics of the massive space, which gobbled up much of the detail in a relentless echo. This was a shame, because many of the most lovely moments centered around delicate interchanges between the group’s two violinists. The band as a whole, while very polished, also seemed to be defeated by the space, with much of their presence and energy falling off the front edge of the stage and onto the ground rather than being projected outward and filling up the room. The city obviously needs to use such a large indoor space for these types of headlining concerts, but I wonder if there is any alternative, more music-friendly space that could be used in future festivals?
After two concerts in one night and a week of other festival-going we were pretty exhausted and ended up leaving as the band was finishing their last encore, hitting a cheap “free fork” Chinese restaurant before heading home. Back at La Rural, dancing to recorded music apparently continued on for many more hours. Some people can never really get enough of el 2x4, and this is where they come to get it.
Ok, what I said in the last entry about the outdoor milonga being cancelled due to rain turned out to not be entirely true. At the last minute it was moved to the massive indoor performance space at La Rural. I heard about this change only after the Fernández Fierro concert, where the news was announced on hand-written signs pasted to the windows of the box office. Since the bus we needed to get back to our neighborhood went directly to La Rural, we decided to go check it out.
We missed the first band entirely, the Orquesta Típica Cerda Negra, and caught only the last two songs of the second, the Orquesta Típica Sans Souci. This second band was noteworthy for, among other things, having the same singer as the Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro, the fantastic Walter “Chino” Laborde, whom we had just seen performing on the other side of town not more than an hour ago. (And in Buenos Aires the other side of town means the other side of town: it took us more than 45 minutes on a dangerously fast bus to get from one show to the other.) With Fernández Fierro, Laborde sang wearing a black kimono and an opaque face mask with an electric blue wig gathered in pigtails. With Sans Souci, which is a much, much, much more traditional kind of orquesta, Laborde wore a three piece beige suit cut in a 1930s style and black wing tips with his hair slicked back like Carlos Gardel. And the band was finishing their set when we showed up!
The evening’s headlining band was the famed Sexteto Mayor, a group formed in the 1970s that has been one of the major torch bearers of traditional tango since that time. They have toured the world with many of the broadway-style shows such as “Tango Argentino.” These shows are largely responsible for re-igniting international interest in the genre in the 1980s and 1990s, and local events like the tango festival have benefited from their success and are in many ways designed to take advantage of it. The band itself has seen a lot of changes over the years, including the deaths of several of their founding members. Their pianist, Oscar Palermo, passed away just last month and has been replaced by Cristian Zárate, at least for now. Aside from Zárate, the band featured a mix of old guard and new guard performers, including relatively young bandoneonist Pablo Mainetti and very young Horacio Romo, the latter of whom was serving as the group’s musical director. Romo, who (I believe) is only 28, has certainly made it. I saw him play with Rubén Juárez at the opening concert of the festival, and here he was leading the band that was headlining the closing event, and leading it with confidence and poise. His playing, too, is top notch, as was that of the band as a whole, though I don’t know if they exactly get your pulse going. It depends on what you want from tango, I suppose. The Sexteto, like all of the groups that I saw play at La Rural during the festival, seemed to struggle against the acoustics of the massive space, which gobbled up much of the detail in a relentless echo. This was a shame, because many of the most lovely moments centered around delicate interchanges between the group’s two violinists. The band as a whole, while very polished, also seemed to be defeated by the space, with much of their presence and energy falling off the front edge of the stage and onto the ground rather than being projected outward and filling up the room. The city obviously needs to use such a large indoor space for these types of headlining concerts, but I wonder if there is any alternative, more music-friendly space that could be used in future festivals?
After two concerts in one night and a week of other festival-going we were pretty exhausted and ended up leaving as the band was finishing their last encore, hitting a cheap “free fork” Chinese restaurant before heading home. Back at La Rural, dancing to recorded music apparently continued on for many more hours. Some people can never really get enough of el 2x4, and this is where they come to get it.
