Buenos Aires, Judgement Day and some Tango
03 June 2011
“It’s a living piece of theatre, and life also means obscenity, excrement, love-making in unusual positions.” (Ligeti on the Big Mac)
Argentina is a country with a great operatic tradition and the highest number of psychologists per capita anywhere in the world. No better place to play Le Grand Macabre, then. The Teatro Colon had the adventurous plan to bring Ligeti’s take on doomsday for the first time to South America. Living it up and the end of the world are high on the Buenos Aires agenda, anyway, so no big step from there to Breughelland. Actually, the city made the opera look strangely tame and somehow quite realistic.
Somehow, it was no big surprise that not everything went as planned. But this took nothing away from a unique experience with some very dedicated people in an incredible opera house in this most operatic city.
(pic – L Arnaud)
In between drinking mate and eating Alfajores, discussing politics, squeezing car horns and listening to a bunch of cardiologists singing tangos, I also met some great porteños.
Chango Spasiuk happened to sit next to me at a reception of the Swiss Embassy in Buenos Aires. His music is called “Chamame” and is a type of folk from the north of Argentina, played on an accordion. I love the accordion from the Pogues to James Crabb – and true to his eastern european roots, Chango plays his instrument like a real virtuoso.
Music is an important factor for social inclusion, all over latin america. One man who took this to heart , is pianist and conductor Claudio Espector . Claudio is the brains and motor behind a Youth Orchestra project in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, Villa Lugano. The orchestra started out in 1998 and has since expanded far beyond its original barrio.
In 2010, Rodolfo Mederos played some great concerts with the OSNC in Colombia. He invited me to a parrilla at his house in Buenos Aires when we met up in Popayan, last year. The barbecue was quite amazing even by Buenos Aires standards, as was the conversation and the hangover the next morning. With Rodolfo and his Orquesta Tipica one hears Tango at its most original and nostalgic.
Finally, there were a few very cool ladies with buenisima onda looking after logistics, press and my mental health in Buenos Aires. They were Marta del Pino and Andrea and Laura Ortego. Laura was really landed in the deep end, because her sister Andrea was due with Lino some time in the end of March. In real life, she is really a great photographer and as a souvenir I bought one of her photographs of a teenage girl in Patagonia. Lino, in turn, became quite probably the youngest ever to see Le Grand Macabre at the tender age of 19 days.