The path of Fleurs Noires knows growing discography, international stages and critical acclaim. Orchestra created in 2003 and made up of 10 musicians from Argentina, France and Finland, the group is directed by the Rosario pianist and composer Andrea Marsili, a resident of Paris since 2002. As part of the Argentina 2023 tour, the orchestra will present today 9:00 p.m. his fourth album, Tangos en Aleph, at the Tango Evenings at the La Casa del Tango Cultural Center (Arturo Illia 1750), with free admission. The show will feature the special participation of Minino Garay (percussion) and Aureliano Marín (voice).
A few days ago, the pianist performed together with Ana Carolina Poenitz, also from Rosario –and a member of Fleurs Noires– on bandoneon and the Rosario Provincial Symphony Orchestra at Teatro El Círculo. There she premiered her work Sombras de Astor. “It was very exciting, many of the members of the Symphony Orchestra are from my generation and we had had professional contacts. With Las Fleurs we have played in the most important theaters in the world, but playing in your city is always much stronger. My teachers from the Faculty attended, lifelong friends, relatives. You can play in the main theater of the United Arab Emirates and it’s great, but when the affection is there, the impact is different. That is why I also decided to put together this tour”, Andrea Marsili points out to Rosario/12.
“When we came for the first time, in 2012, we didn’t know what we were going to find. We did a tango that some here called ‘French tango’ and that people over there called ‘contemporary tango’. But it was wonderful. As happened to us in San Pedro, where they stood up; I was in tears, because they began to applaud in the middle of the songs, something that has not happened to us on any other stage in Europe. There was a second tour in 2013; and then many things happened, the pandemic, the crisis here and there, the war. Now we are coming to present the fourth album, ”he continues.
-What are the motivations behind Tangos en Aleph?
-Since the first record, my idea as a composer –to which the group adhered– was to identify what the DNA of tango was. This was also part of my doctoral thesis. My goal was to find the center of tango and see how far I could move away or what aspects I had to work on to be making a contemporary tango. I didn’t want to do a fusion tango but rather a rereading of the language, to see how far I could give tango a new life without it ceasing to be tango. From the first album we went towards a timbre, harmonic orchestral direction, and a path was created that continued in the following albums. But when I started to compose the fourth album, I was no longer the same person as at 22 years old, I had other concerns, such as my desire to include electroacoustic music. This led me to give another space to the voice, to the timbre search for voices and texts. This is how Borges’ story appears, “El Aleph”, where he talks about a nucleus in which all the points of the universe, the present and the past, are seen, everything merges and confuses. That was always somewhat my way of seeing tango, from a more universal vision and not so marked by Buenos Aires or Montevideo; but a music that can be heard or appreciated by any music lover, regardless of his nationality. I felt that conceptually it was the right framework for this new album. And the voices of Daniel Melingo and Aureliano Marín appeared. It was their timbre that inspired me to treat them like musical instruments. I had Melingo’s voice recorded, then I treated it electroacoustically, and then I incorporated it into the composition as one more instrument. In the case of Marín, I wanted to write a topic related to femicides; talking with Omar Marsili, my father, who is the one who writes the lyrics of my music, we wrote “Hammer for the witches”; I had the orchestration and the text was finished, but the melody, the sung part, did not come to me. Until I hear a video of Marín. It was what he was looking for. I wrote the melodic part right away and for his voice. That also marked the beginning of a collaboration with him. To summarize, Tangos en Aleph is part of this evolutionary path and search that we have been taking with the Fleurs in these 20 years.
-On the other hand, in “Alas de malambo” folklore intervenes and in a striking way.
-“Alas de malambo” has another reason for being. First, it is a theme inspired by Ginastera’s work, which has always fascinated me; I decided to dedicate myself to the piano when I heard the Argentine Dances. It’s the most optimistic song on the album, and I decided to include it because the themes of the other songs are more complex. For example, “Tattoos” arises from how the disappearance and later death of Santiago Maldonado affected me; and “Moutangos de Panurge” is a work inspired by the story of Rabelais, where he raises how a sheep can be followed by others, and although they do not know if they are leading them to success or failure, they still follow it. There came a time when I said to myself “I seem like a pessimist”, and it’s not like that, it’s not my way of seeing things. That is why I included “Alas de malambo”, where a phrase from the chorus says “you said you would like to fly, you said you can fly”, that is a bit of my life’s motto.
-Tango seems to be a great question, it provokes drifts and possible answers, but one always returns to it.
-And at the same time it is what makes it not die, because of that permeability that it has and that attracts the musician, because he finds in it a language where freedom is possible and creation is welcome. The fact of always going back to his DNA speaks of the richness of the genre, that we can go back to the center and propose things. In our case, these four disks. Between each one there were four years of work and reflection, but they are different. If you want, you can see the signature of the same person, but the stages are very marked and it is thanks to the richness of tango and his DNA, which is above all rhythmic. For me, the code par excellence is all the aspects that are linked to the rhythmic groove, which differentiates it from many other types of music. Tango was born as music to be danced and today it is not, but this rhythmic aspect is a constant element in any tango current, it is a meeting point. You can be in New York, Buenos Aires or Paris, and that kind of interpretation of those parameters is common practice. Another fundamental and specific parameter is the way of being played. We have a score, but if it is not interpreted as tango it is not. This is not the case with classical music, in whose score we have almost all the information; in tango there is a part that is only transmitted orally. Despite the fact that we no longer have the old tangueros who teach us to play by imitation, the jeites are not explained anywhere. The one who knows how to play tango knows it because it was explained to him orally or because he grabbed records and imitated them. That unwritten part of tango, so specific and fundamental to its DNA, must also be maintained when we want to practice it.
2023-08-26 04:32:59
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