Born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, Astor Piazzolla immigrated with his family to New York, where he grew up on the Lower East Side. Sports and other activities interested him far more than the tango, the music of his father. The gift of a bandoneon, the button accordion brought to Argentina from Germany, began to change that. Piazzolla was 16 years old when his family returned to Argentina, and he was soon playing with the best tango orchestras, including that of Aníbal Troilo. In 1944 Piazzolla left the Troilo band to form his own ensemble that performed his own compositions. At the time, he was studying composition with Alberto Ginastera. His Sinfonía Buenos Aires, which premiered in 1953, earned him a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who advised him to cultivate the tango as his true mode of expression.

This he did with increasing assurance and originality after returning to Argentina the following year. He formed the Octeto Buenos Aires and then a quinteto as the performing vehicles for his Nuevo Tango: tango + tragedy + comedy + whorehouse, as he once defined it. To that equation he added greater harmonic sophistication―chromatic lines over chains of dominant sequences, much like Baroque ground-bass forms and an elusive jazz swing.

Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango dates from the mid-1980s, a period when he was composing more often for other performers than himself. Its four movements trace the evolution of the tango in the 20th century, though all four of the movements are unmistakably Piazzolla. The first is a blithe up-tempo dance with ragtime sparkle and syncopation. The second movement has the character of a French jazz ballad, slow and poignant. The third movement begins with a crisp introduction, but it too turns lyrical and reflective in its central section. In the fourth movement, the traditional tango has been abstracted into biting self-criticism, spiky in harmony and often brutal in rhythmic point. —John Henken