Fueye ¡ The breath of the bandoneon

A journey of listening animated by the breath of the bandoneon, crossed by new circulations between popular tango and contemporary creation.

To describe an itinerary marked out by Luis Naón is to think of Argentina, where the composer comes from. And to imagine Argentina is to be immediately invaded by emotional images that are not necessarily all clichés. Contrasting landscapes, cultures and sounds: the immense expanses saturated with wind, the skyscrapers and the slums of Buenos Aires, the European heritage and the Amerindian heritage, the refinement of the musical writing and the sentimental nostalgia of the tango.

It is this journey, which resembles him, that Luis Naón invites us to undertake with him.

To leave under the blessing of Béla Bartók and two of his Contrasts, the nocturne and the endiablé, as if to equip himself with complementary virtuosities and a baggage of popular music. Then he aims at the horizon of Fueye, a concertino for bandoneon and ensemble given as a world premiere: breath, energies, frictions of inspiration, a whole field of noisy attacks and harmonic resonances where the spirit of the tango would be in suspension. “A journey“, writes Luis Naón in reference to Borges, “between a mythology of the suburbs and an exploration of time, sound matter, limits and infinity”.

Each step gives appointment to the invention. The radicality of Charisma, when Iannis Xenakis, half a century ago, imagined with a freedom escaped from the chapels and dogmas the saturation and the almost nothing. The sonic amazement of Kaija Saariaho‘s Oi Kuu, an exclusively acoustic piece that sounds like a field of electronic waves – the two domains being often linked in the composer’s writing as in Luis Naón‘s. The ferocity of Op. 973 Bestial by the young German composer Martin Grütter – premiered by TM+ at the Mixtur Festival in Barcelona in 2019 – who admits to being bored by the routine of the feasible and prefers the excitement of wild virtuosity. To which answers the animal rhythm, the almost shamanic ritual of Xenakis’ Rebonds B, where the percussionist becomes a jaguar on the stretched skins.

Each encounter is a surprise of the unexpected – starting with the tangos with the solo bandoneon and the Tango Si, a little jewel on the piano by Betsy Jolas, barely a smoke of tango, a spark of rhythm, a perfume of melody that passes. Through the confrontation of the most contemporary musical writing and traditional tangos, our listening will unconsciously infuse a little of the sentimentality of the one into the density of the other, and in reverse it will discover subtleties in popular music that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

The Journeys of Listening are often a matter of climates: this one borrows from the inner meteorology of Luis Naón who thinks of his music as a boiling of atoms, an organic flow passing through many natural meanders between the instrumentalist and the listener. The bandoneon, a vigorous instrument whose surprising construction – its anatomy – makes its conduct complex and its sequences unpredictable, plays the role of a wild horse.