Performance: Let's Tango

Aotea Centre

Review: Tara Werner


Raunchy, rhythmic and all the rage in the dance studios in Auckland, tango is here to stay.

Six dancers showed how it was done, slinking across the Aotea stage in a variety of amorous styles, all calculated to display how couples can dance impossibly close and lasciviously cheek-to-cheek.

Tango is intensely physical yet strangely melancholic - two of the elements very much on display in the dances chosen for this Auckland Philharmonia concert.

But not everything worked as smoothly at the start of the all-tango programme. Given the passionate nature of much of the music, the orchestra took a while to warm up, despite the cajoling of conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya.

The musicians looked distinctly uncomfortable at first, and even Stravinsky's acerbic Tango (1940) with its wonderfully quirky rhythms did not fire them up. The mushy Hesitation-Tango by Samuel Barber probably did not help, and it was not until Edwin Carr's pithy El Tango and Piazzolla's Concerto for Bandoneon did the atmosphere change.

Soloist Horacio Romo made short work of the concerto, the third movement almost obsessive in its forceful off-beat.

Truly the colossus of tango, Piazzolla's music dominated the programme, whether the concerto or the clever Fuga y Misterio with its passing nod to Bach.

The sound of the bandoneon is so intrinsically Argentine that a tango would just not be a tango without the instrument.

As an accompaniment to the dances, a selection of traditional tangos performed on bandoneon, piano, violin and double bass was at the core of the concert, with vocalist Hernan Chico Zarate adding an authentic croon to Gardel's El Dia que me quieros.

But the dancers stole the show, despite the dry ice which threatened to swamp one couple's sinuous elegance.