The Life

Back in Buenos Aires he joined Aníbal Troilo’s orchestra in 1939 as a bandoneonist and arranger, and studied composition with Alberto Ginastera. In 1953 his Buenos Aires Symphony won the Fabien Sevitzky prize, and with it a French government grant to study in Paris. There, in 1954, he played Nadia Boulanger one of his tangos, Triunfal, and she told him that this, and not the symphony, was the music he should go on writing.

He made the tango a chamber music. The Octeto Buenos Aires (1955) put an electric guitar in a tango band; the Quinteto of 1960 (bandoneon, violin, piano, electric guitar and double bass) became his model. He wrote Adiós Nonino in New York in October 1959, after his father’s death, in less than an hour. In 1968 he and the poet Horacio Ferrer made María de Buenos Aires, a tango operita premiered with the singer Amelita Baltar, and in Milan in May 1974 he recorded Libertango.

Purists in Buenos Aires called it a betrayal. After a heart attack in 1973 he kept working: the second Quinteto, the Quinteto Tango Nuevo, from 1978; Le Grand Tango, written in 1982 for Mstislav Rostropovich; Tango: Zero Hour in 1986; The New Tango with Gary Burton in 1987. He had a bypass operation in 1988, suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in Paris on 4 August 1990, and died in Buenos Aires on 4 July 1992.

This is a demo site, a tribute built to show a TJP Web site: pages, a menu, a journal and three languages. Its dates are the demo’s own.