Orchestras 2023
Asato – Pais Duo
Cristián Asato (piano) and Ayelén Pais (bandoneon) began working together in 2018, having each previously played in different orchestras. Ayelén played Aníbal Troilo’s instrument in the Academia Nacional del Tango, an important and unforgettable experience for her. Later she was a member of the Orquesta Típica Sans Souci and the Orquesta Romantica Milonguera. Cristián was a student of Nicolás Ledesma when he became a member and later professor of the Orquesta Escuela de Tango Emilio Balcarce. A formative experience for him was when he was allowed to play a concert with Leopoldo Federico as director. As a duo, they play pieces from the Golden Era in their own arrangements.
Asato-Pais Duo | Sitio oficial | – ASATO-PAIS DUO | Sitio oficial (asatopaisduo.com)
Beltango Quinteto
25 years of Beltango! It is hard to believe. That’s how long this ensemble from Belgrade has been in existence and has been thrilling the international tango world with its interpretations. Not denying their Balkan origins, they create a rousing symbiosis with Argentinean tango. At our festival they will present their new album. We take the opportunity to congratulate them on their anniversary.
Duo Eva Tsigkanou & Gustavo Colmenarejo
Eva Tsigkanou and Gustavo Colmenarejo live in Berlin and are actually known in the tango scene as dancers and teachers. With us, they show themselves from a different side. Raised in Athens, Eva studied piano and guitar and soon discovered her love for Argentine folklore, which she began to study intensively – also on location in Argentina. Performances with various ensembles at festivals and concerts in Greece, Turkey and Germany followed. Gustavo, born in the Argentine province of Córdoba, came into contact with the tango in his early youth when he discovered a songbook with the 100 best-known tangos in his mother’s bookshelf. His mother’s audition soon turned into singing together with her son, whose enthusiasm quickly grew by recording music cassettes of tango songs from the radio. After moving to Berlin, he initially worked as a tango teacher and only played and sang among friends. A friend persuaded him to perform on stage, and more performances followed. Eva and Gustavo have a lot in common. Interesting for us is their love for Argentine folklore and here especially for the music of Atahualpa Yupanqui, the most important Argentine folklore musician of the 20th century.
Gustavo Colmenarejo – Tango Argentino – Dancer and Singer (gustavoargentango.blogspot.com)
Duo Luna – Tobaldi
Agustín Luna is an Argentine guitarist with a wide repertoire of tangos and foklore. His album “Cuerda al aire” is part of the famous collection “Guitarras del Mundo (vol. 37)”. Joint performances with the Argentinean star guitarist Juan Falú are among his career highlights. He has a long musical friendship with the bandoneonist Luciano Tobaldi. Luciano is also based in Argentina, where he became a member of well-known ensembles such as Quinteto Negro La Boca and Rascacielos. Later he played with Daniel Melingo and Vinico Capossela. As a duo, the two performed at major festivals such as Tarbes and Tango en Punta, and in numerous milongas in Argentina, Uruguay and Europe. If there is also singing in this instrumental line-up, it is usually the guitarist who does it. Here it is the bandoneonist Luciano who takes over this part.
Electrocutango
This Norwegian ensemble – along with Gotan Project, Otros Aires, Bajofondo and Tanghetto – is one of the founders of electrotango. Their debut album “Felino” is one of the classics of the genre. Sverre Indris Joner, founder and head of the band, was named “Academico Correspondiente” of the Academia Nacional del Tango by Horacio Ferrer, a knightly accolade for a tango musician. After a long break with other projects, they returned to the tango stage some time ago. It is almost a tradition that the first concert at our festival on Friday evening is reserved for Electrotango. With Electrocutango we can present a prominent representative.
La Santa Calavera Orquesta de Tango
The time of the pandemic was a great challenge for the musicians in Buenos Aires. There were suddenly no more performance opportunities, booked concerts were cancelled. Some made do with streaming concerts, some ensembles broke up. But the crisis also released a lot of creativity, which led to the formation of new groups. La Santa Calavera is a creation of this time. Founder, director and musical director Mauricio Jost was previously first bandoneonist for many years with Sexteto Milonguero, Tango Bardo and Orquesta Típica Romantica Milonguera. Together with the second bandoneonist Sofia Calvet, previously also with Romantica Milonguera, they used the time to rehearse new arrangements with other musicians, all with backgrounds in different ensembles and styles. We worked for a long time to convince them to present the result of their work in Europe. We are very happy that this has succeeded and that we can welcome them for their European premiere.
Los Milonguitas
We know the Milonguitas from their last performances at La Locura, where – sometimes as a trio, sometimes as a quartet – they filled the dance floor. But Pablo Murgier, Simone Tolomeo and Sebastian Noya are not content to repeat earlier programmes. They experiment, sometimes solo and in other formations, and reinterpret the music again and again. This time they are joined by the Japanese violinist Machiko Ozawa. Inspired by the style of the great orchestras of the Golden Era, they play new compositions, divided into wonderfully danceable tandas.
Mariana Mazú Trio
None other than the singer Hernan “Cucuza” Castiello, who was much in demand in the Buenos Aires tango scene, gave the impulse for Mariana Mazú to turn to singing professionally after she had first worked as a psychoanalyst. This was followed by performances in the trendy clubs of Buenos Aires and her first album “La bella indiferencia”, for which she immediately won the “Premio Gardel” in the category “Best Album Female Tango Artist” of the year 2021. Leo Andersen is a sought-after guitarist and composer from Argentina who has worked with outstanding musicians such as harmonica player Franco Luciani and is now doing several projects with Mariana Mazú. The two have added as a third Karl Espegard, the Norwegian violinist whom many remember fondly from his past performances at La Locura.
Bienvenido | Mariana Mazú | Sitio Web Oficial de Mariana Mazú (marianamazu.com)
No Tags
A music festival makes it possible to present ensembles not only in the formation that made them famous, but also to reveal other sides of them. No Tags is the encounter between the Japanese violinist Machiko Ozawa and the trio Los Milonguitas. Influenced by the compositions of Astor Piazzolla and Horacio Salgán, No Tags takes the music that shaped the avant-garde of tango and fuses it with the sound of today. The ensemble integrates the influences of all its members, who come from tango, jazz and classical chamber music. Machiko Ozawa has won awards and performed on major stages, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York and Nikkei Hall in Tokyo, among many others. Together with the Milonguitas, they released the album “Azimut Project” with loudly original compositions that bundle the various influences of the ensemble members and their places of residence Paris and Ney York. Focused on the deterritorialisation of tango, Azimut wants to free the genre from the stigmatizing connotations of time and place. An exciting project.
Orquesta Silbando
The orchestra in the formation of an Orquesta Típica with piano, two bandoneons, two violins, a viola, double bass and a singer sees itself in the tradition of the classical tango orchestras with the repertoire of the golden age, supplemented by many new tangos, also arranged and composed by themselves, from other musical genres. From their home in Paris, they travel to concerts, balls and festivals all over Europe and even sometimes to Buenos Aires, where they have been described as one of the best tango orchestras of today. Chloë Pfeiffer, pianist and leader of the orchestra, is well known and sought after in the wider tango scene as an arranger. At the end of the festival, she will add several musicians from other ensembles to the orchestra to form the Orquesta Típica XXL and bring the hall to the boil once again.
Orquesta Típica Sans Souci
The “Orquesta Típica Sans Souci” was founded in 1998 in Buenos Aires with the intention of reviving the traditional musical style of the orchestras of Miguel Caló and Osmar Maderna for modern audiences. Since its foundation, the orchestra has performed continuously on renowned Argentinean and also international stages. The “Sans Souci” has participated several times in the “Festival Mundial de Tango Buenos Aires” and in programmes such as “Verano de emociones” in Córdoba, Ushuaia and Mar del Plata. Tours through Argentina and the neighbouring countries of Brazil and Paraguay and participation in major European festivals such as the First International Tango Festival in Lisbon were on the agenda. In 2018, the orchestra performed at the “International Tango Summit” in Los Angeles before returning to Europe the following year. In 2020, the third album was recorded. Further performances at the “Mundial” and the most famous stages of Buenos Aires confirm the reputation of this ensemble. Its performance planned at our previous festival had to be cancelled due to corona-related difficulties. We are all the more pleased to be able to bring Sans Souci with singer Emiliano Castignola back to Europe for the first time.
Roberta Roman Trio
Roberta Roman, the trio’s namesake, originally from Italy, became interested early on in the Italian influences on the music of Argentine tango. She discovered forgotten and lost melodies of Neapolitan immigrants and brought them back to life.
Marisa Mercadé found the bandoneon in her native Buenos Aires. In Paris, she played for years with Juan Jose Mosalini, later with Juan Carlos Caceres, Daniel Melingo and more recently with Miguel di Genova’s Otros Aires, with whom she participated in the last La Locura.
Cellist Michèle Pierre plays a classical repertoire, operas and chamber music in various orchestras and smaller formations, but always finds her way to jazz, as she does to tango with this trio.
The interesting, unusual instrumentation with bandoneon, guitar and cello allows for intense communication, the exchange of phrases within a suggestive and complex musical spectrum in which each instrument can fully express itself.
home – Roberta Roman | Le battement de la passion derrière une guitare (roberta-roman.com)
SONICO
Astor Piazzolla is widely regarded as the composer and musician who gave Argentine tango a completely new expression in the 1960s. What remained hidden from the broad European public was that at the same time, another composer was writing music in Buenos Aires that was in no way inferior to Piazzolla’s and could just as easily be described as avant-garde: Eduardo Rovira. While Piazzolla went to Europe and promoted his music, Rovira stayed in Argentina. Marketing was not his strong point. Both respected and appreciated each other, but only met twice. The music is comparable in many ways; many pieces were written for their respective octets. It is to the credit of the SONICO ensemble that Rovira’s music has been discovered and made available to a wide audience. The octet, internationally cast and based in Brussels, has released several albums, some exclusively with pieces by Rovira. At La Locura, SONICO will play the music of Piazzolla’s “Octeto Buenos Aires” and Rovira’s “Octeto La Plata”, which was released together for the first time in 2021 in the album “Piazzolla – Rovira: The Edge of Tango”. It contains well-known, but also lost and rediscovered, as well as previously unreleased pieces. We are looking forward to an exciting, intense concert experience.
Tanguango Quinteto
Five young female musicians came together in Belgrade in 2013 to play tango together after having been members of the Tango Youth Orchestra. This orchestra was led by Alexander Nikolic, the head of Quinteto Beltango. Since then, they have performed at numerous festivals and events, especially in the Balkan region, most recently at the festival “Tarbes en Tango”. In 2021, they brought Piazzolla’s tango opera “Maria de Buenos Aires” to the stage in Belgrade. Their refreshing way of interpreting well-known tangos will delight the audience. We predict a stellar career for the quintet.
DJs
DJ Aurora Fornuto
Aurora’s DJ quality is confirmed by her many engagements at all the big and famous marathons and festivals all over Europe. Athens, Lisbon, Tarbes, Catania, Zurich and many other places invite her regularly. She is resident DJ at Bunker Tango in Turin and organiser of many events with live music and workshops. We are happy to have her at our festival for the second time.
DJ Lepera
DJ Martin “Lepera” from Hard near Bregenz is a tango teacher and runs the tango studio Otra Luna with his wife Claudia Grava, from where they create many interesting projects with tango and expressive dance. Lepera regularly plays at his “Kesselhaus” milonga in Bregenz.
DJ Sebastian
Sebastian is a resident DJ in Innsbruck. He has been DJing for many years in milongas and at tango weeks in Germany (Berlin, Hamburg, Gut Frohberg) in Switzerland (Bergün) and soon at La Milonga on Crete.
