Tango

Program notes

About the Work

Stravinsky’s Tango is a miniature with an outsized place in his biography: it was the first piece he composed after settling in the United States, written in Hollywood in 1940 as he began a new American life that would last the rest of his days. He wrote it first for piano, and later made the spare, slightly acid orchestration usually heard today. By this point Stravinsky was deep into his ‘neoclassical’ phase, and the Tango shows his sardonic, cosmopolitan side: a familiar popular dance refracted through his unmistakable harmonic lens, elegant and a little austere, more wry homage than sultry seduction.

Coming at the start of an evening that runs from Stravinsky’s Russian beginnings to wartime America and on to Weimar Germany, the Tango sets a tone of twentieth-century displacement and reinvention: a Russian émigré in California, writing a dance of Argentine origin, in the cool, ironic voice of European modernism.

What to Listen For

This is over almost before it begins, so listen closely. Notice the deliberate stiffness. Stravinsky drains the tango of its usual heat and replaces it with clipped rhythms, tart harmonies and a slightly mechanical tread. There is sensuality here, but it is held at arm’s length, observed with a cool, knowing eye. It makes a piquant, brief curtain-raiser, and a first glimpse of Stravinsky the émigré craftsman.