The Auckland Philharmonia at Aotea Centre

By WILLIAM DART

What: Four Seasons in Buenos Aires by Astor Piazzolla, plus Tchaikovsky's Suite No 4 and Petrouchka by Stravinsky

When: Thursday, May 8, 8pm

The tango makes its devotees do the strangest things. The distracted Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard had floors tiled when Rudolph Valentino claimed there was nothing like tiles for a tango; 20 years later, the high point of Bertolucci's The Conformist was Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli in a tango clutch. And, two years after this, the dance gave its name to what would be the Italian director's most controversial film, Last Tango in Paris.

All this is mere party trivia if you take tango seriously and, if you do take the dance to heart, Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) is God. This is the man who, back in 1954, caused a fracas by introducing bandoneons (an Argentinian concertina) into the symphony hall and who would eventually, in 1979, write a fully fledged concerto for the instrument.

Ironically, Piazzolla grew up in New York and didn't return to his native Argentina until the age of 37. Composing didn't come easily - or immediately. "I had not yet been touched with the magic wand of composition," was Piazzolla's comment on his early years, working with Tango King Carlos Gardel.

He would be shrewdly self-critical enough to dismiss his own prizewinning Sinfonietta as having "too many things in it".

He admired Gershwin and, like the American, felt the urge to study in Europe. His choice fell on Nadia Boulanger, that eminently sensible nurturer of so many young composers, who eventually packed him off back to Argentina and told him to write music that came from his heart.

And so tangos poured from the man, played (and recorded) by various ensembles with Piazzolla's own bandoneon centre stage. His American and European experiences meant his music was equally informed by the cool sonorities of jazz and the Bachian discipline of fugue.

By the 1970s and 80s, his audience grew wider. His Libertango album was phenomenally popular when it appeared in 1975, and it gained a new audience when Grace Jones included a synth-chiselled version of the title song on her 1981 Nightclubbing album. One of Piazzolla's last projects, in 1990, was a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, Five Tango Sensations.

The Auckland Philharmonia has given us Piazzolla before. In 2000, we were treated to his Three Tangos for Bandoneon and Orchestra, a work which, as American composer Eric Salzman so rightly put it, "is to the old Argentine tango what Ravel's La Valse is to the old Viennese Waltz or what the Gershwin concerto is to piano blues".

On Thursday we have the chance to hear the orchestra's concertmaster Justine Cormack tackle Piazzolla's Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas (The Four Seasons in Buenos Aires). This consists of four seasonal glimpses of Buenos Aires, written in the 60s and 70s for the tango band, and reworked in breathtaking arrangements for solo violin and strings by the Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov.

Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas was the most recent of various Piazzolla projects undertaken by the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer. Kremer's 2001 recording of the work, interweaving the Piazzolla with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, caught the imagination of players and orchestras throughout the world, who clamoured for a score. Now that score and orchestral parts are finally available, the Auckland Philharmonia will be one of the first to play the work in concert.

Piazzolla has few more fervent disciples than Kremer who admits he fell in love with the Argentinian composer because "after hearing hundreds of tangos in Buenos Aires, I could always recognise him, not only his playing but his compositions. That's what I call the DNA of an artist, something that is recognisable by simple listening".

On Thursday night, why not check out the DNA for yourself?