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Por amor al tango
A visit to Colombia to attend the Festival International de Tango de Medellín in June overlapped with a tour of the country by La Guardia Nueva, the guitar trio from Argentina that, earlier this year, won a first annual world competition for tango orchestras. They presented POR AMOR DEL TANGO, a CD featuring the singer…
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Festitango 2017
June 20-25 was my third time at the Festival International de Tango Medellín, a festival I like for its musical programming, its focus (in the city of Gardel’s death) on singers, and the window it opens on the city’s tango culture, which values professional distinction and amateur achievement in equal measure. There are competitions for…
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Hermia & Helena
HERMIA & HELENA opens in a New York that might, until the clues cohere, be Buenos Aires. Flowers that could be in any garden, fulgent with color. The echo of drumming on the avenues. A city park – where? The impression depends, to be sure, on a sense of both cities. The Argentine director Matías…
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Alberto Ginastera
Alberto Ginastera was born on April 11, 1916, and it was a hundred years later, on April 11, 2016, that the Spectrum Symphony presented a centennial commemoration of the Argentine composer at the Broadway Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. The wide-ranging and innovative concert wasn’t limited to works and performances by Ginastera or other artists with…
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The Princess of France
There is a type of film that tells a story from Shakespeare, with or without his language, that happens in a time and place that might be called “a world without Shakespeare.” A plot unfolds that is recognizable as that of a Shakespeare play. But, a funny thing about the unfolding: in a milieu that…
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Ariel Ardit
Trim but stout looking, with a widow’s peak the curves of which seem to raise the eyebrows on his armadillo face, giving him a look not of surprise but of perpetual sympathy and amusement, the tango singer Ariel Ardit could be a clown or comedian were it not for his consummate posture and deportment, strong,…
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Adriana Varela
Last night, at Teatro Metropolitano in Medellín, Colombia, I heard Adriana Varela sing tango. This was no small matter. There are those who say she is the best living tango singer (among those still active), and although she recorded her first tangos in 1991, she carries the patina of an earlier era. She commands the…
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Buenos Aires Restaurant
If I understood the situation correctly I was, a number of years ago, the first customer at Buenos Aires Restaurant. Excited upon walking down 6th Street and discovering that an Argentine parrilla was about to open in my neighborhood, I jotted down the phone number and called as soon as I got home. It was…
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Festival de otoño en primavera
I saw three shows at Madrid’s eccentrically named FESTIVAL DE OTOÑO EN PRIMAVERA (Fall Festival in Springtime), which brought a plethora of international theater to the Spanish capital in May and June. My listening comprehension of Spanish is what it is, so I would not pretend to have followed every thread of the multiple plots…