The music of
Astor Piazzolla, rather like
Bach's, is amenable to realizations in a variety of instrumental media, and since the hit recordings by
Gidon Kremer and company, it has been subjected to many orchestral and chamber treatments. This release from saxophonist Marco Albonetti comes with an endorsement by
Piazzolla keyboardist and nuevo tango giant
Pablo Ziegler, and it's hard to imagine that
Piazzolla himself, who grew up amidst New York jazz, would have objected to it much. Except for the one by
Ziegler of Oblivion, the arrangements for saxophone and orchestra are Albonetti's.
Piazzolla was not a jazz artist; what he and his accompanying musicians played was specified in one way or another. Yet, with his mix of a fixed rhythmic basis and melodic elaboration, he was a kindred spirit to jazz. Albonetti seems to emphasize the blurred genre lines by introducing
Ziegler's Oblivion arrangement with a genuine jazz improvisation, both pointing up the non-jazz nature of the rest of the pieces and making clear the continuity of mood. The simpler pieces, allowing Albonetti to flaunt his beautiful tone work best here; try Años de Soledad, a bit less familiar than the other pieces, where he plays a baritone saxophone. The Cuatro estaciones porteñas (The Four "Port City" Seasons, or Buenos Aires Four Seasons), have to transfer their more chordal and polyphonic bandoneon parts to the saxophone and orchestra somehow; they break up the pieces' basic forms, and to these ears don't always put them together again. Nowhere, however, is Albonetti's album less than stimulating, and it's often beautiful. It will certainly find a place in
Piazzolla collections. ~ James Manheim