Although the tango is a dance indigenous to Argentina and Brazil first traced to a piece of sheet music entitled Toma maté, ché (1857), its strict national orientation began to erode by about 1912, when it took Stockholm and Paris without a shot fired; by 1913 the tango was everywhere. It is the "everywhere-ness" of the tango that pianist
Aki Takahashi explores in her Camerata recording Hesitation-Tango: Tango Collection 1890-2005.
Astor Piazzolla is the only Argentine composer represented; the rest are either American, Japanese, or European, and all but six of the disc's 20 selections were composed after World War II. Such sprawling collections on a thematic concept are nothing new to pianist
Aki Takahashi, who was the chief architect of the "Hyper-Beatles" project undertaken by Toshiba-EMI, which commissioned classical works based on the music of the Beatles from no less than 47 composers worldwide. One hastens to bring up the specter of Nonesuch's The Tango Project or
Yvar Mikhashoff's New Albion album Incitation to Desire, which contained all of the various tangos he commissioned from composers. The point being, of course, that this is hardly an original idea, and
Takahashi is certainly not above borrowing from the earlier projects, as the inclusion of
Conlon Nancarrow's Tango? (from Nonesuch's Tango Project) and Michael Sahl's Exiles Café Tango (for
Mikhashoff) bears witness.
So, rather than being a historical survey of the tango, as the title seems to imply, Hesitation-Tango: Tango Collection 1890-2005 is another postmodern collection of tangos that simply draws upon some older stuff. The eight
Takahashi commissions, therefore, form the core of the album. These are a mixed bag; James Sellars' Tango Takahashi is just okay and Haruna Miyake's 43 Degrees North -- A Tango seems a bit unfocused and rambles on a bit too long. Nobuyasu Sakonda's New Century Song starts off lyrically but ends up sounding like a silent movie score, and
Jo Kondo's Tango Mnemonic is so slight and non-committal that it goes in one ear and right out the other; writing tangos doesn't appear to be
Kondo's bag. However, the three Eurasian Tangos by polystylist composer
AYUO are charming and disarmingly simple and the second of them does maintain something of a standard tango rhythm. A real surprise is Akira Nishimura's Tango, in which he more or less completely abandons his usual manner in favor of a tango that is quirky, serious-minded, and reminiscent of
Prokofiev.
It is not that
Takahashi plays any of the music badly; on the contrary, she plays most of it very well and Camerata's recording is certainly up to its usual high standard in reproducing the sound of the piano. It's just that in the 2000s this idea doesn't seem very novel and the collection isn't very revelatory, whereas
Takahashi's other efforts generally are. The one major exception among the non-commissions is the Tango No. 1 of Henri Cliquet-Pleyel, written in 1920; Cliquet-Pleyel was a member of Satie's so-called "School of Arcueil" and his piece is more postmodern-sounding than many of the most recent things featured here. If that, the commissions, and
Takahashi's take on all these high-art tangos are enough, then by all means go for Camerata's Hesitation-Tango: Tango Collection 1890-2005. Otherwise, despite the good things that are on it, this seems like a misfire.