Sunday, September 22, 2024

Yuri Liberzon Continues Piazzolla Pursuits

According to my archives, my interest in guitarist Yuri Liberzon dates back over fourteen years. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter took place when he gave a solo recital for Old First Concerts in August of 2010. Since that time, I have accumulated (and written about) two of his self-produced albums, Ascension and ¡Acentuado!. The former made for an engaging “time machine,” with Liberzon’s own transcriptions of keyboard music by Domenico Scarlatti and Johann Sebastian Bach framed by Toru Takemitsu’s transcriptions of Beatles songs.

¡Acentuado!, on the other hand, was, to the best of my knowledge, Liberzon’s first album devoted entirely to Astor Piazzolla. It consisted of two suites. Histoire du Tango was scored for flute and guitar, while Tango-Études was originally another suite for flute. However, Manuel Barrueco transcribed all six of its movements into guitar solos. This was an impressive undertaking, and I was glad to see that the album is still available, both physically and digitally, from a Bandcamp Web page. (Just to be complete about these matters, Ascension also has its own Bandcamp Web page!)

Cover of the new Liberzon album

This coming Friday, Naxos will release a new album of Liberzon performing Piazzolla. As usually seems to be the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. It includes a new recording of Tango-Études. It also includes “La muerte del ángel” in the transcription by Leo Brouwer that I first encountered on David Tanenbaum’s all-Piazzolla album, El Porteño. The other selections on the album include Liberzon’s arrangement of “Oblivion,” the Cinco piezas collection composed for solo guitar, and the three-movement Tango Suite, which was composed for two guitars. Piotr Pakhomkin joined Liberzon for the recording of that selection.

I have long had a soft spot for Piazzolla’s music (as those that have followed my work for some time have probably already guessed). As a result, if I have any quibble at all, it is with the absence of the flute in Tango-Études. These six pieces are relatively short, but they account for a wide diversity of dispositions. Having listened to the flute work in Histoire du Tango, I can appreciate how the flute would deliver a sassier account of the études. Still, I dare not try to argue with Barrueco’s transcription of those études or, for that matter, Liberzon’s delivery.

In other words, there are too many sources of satisfaction on Liberzon’s new album for me to quibble over picking nits!

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