Piazzolla - María de Buenos Aires

The Guardian 60

Bonilla-Torres / Mancini / Mertes / Beethoven Orchestra Bonn / Sprenger (Capriccio, two CDs)
Piazzolla’s 1968 work is supposed to be the story of tango itself, but this concert performance isn’t quite edgy enough

Astor Piazzolla’s “tango operita” ought to be a regular part of the music-theatre repertory by now. It has all the ingredients of a popular stage show, and CD recordings of it run into double figures, but in Britain at least, María de Buenos Aires has yet to be presented convincingly on stage. This recording, from the Bonn Opera, appears to have been taken from a concert performance, too. If the work really is dramatically intractable, then the problem is partly the work itself. Horacio Ferrer’s libretto has holes, and it’s written in lunfardo, a working-class dialect developed in the River Plate area of Argentina and Uruguay in the 19th century. Attempts to turn it into “proper” Spanish, or English, sanitise the text and rid it of the earthiness that’s an essential part of its world.