Peter Breiner: enTANGOed June 2009

Born from the music and dance of immigrants in the late nineteenth-century suburbs of Buenos Aires, tango has been a metaphor for longing, passion, and the search for identity. Complex and ambiguous, over time, tango bridged different ethnic, social, musical, and even geographical worlds. Diverse cultural and historical coincidences shaped tango into a genre whose refinement is all but coincidental. The history of tango reflects a subtle relationship between coincidence and purpose, a twosome that so often is the crucial ingredient in the great creations of mankind. The encounter between tango and Peter Breiner also can be seen as both random and inevitable. As a composer, arranger, pianist, and conductor who moves comfortably among numerous musical styles, genres, and performance venues, Breiner found in the multiple musical and cultural dimensions of tango a natural habitat, where crossing-or, perhaps, erasing-boundaries not only was allowed but virtually inevitable.

Although not so unusual in the past, today it is rather rare to see the concert pianist conducting the orchestra from behind the piano and, eventually, playing his own music. Breiner is a complete musician: he plays, arranges, and conducts the music of disparate styles and genres, from classical, jazz, popular, and film to folk and the traditional music of various world cultures, revealing fascinating connections between them. Thus, Breiner’s rendezvous with tango is both natural and unique. As a pianist/composer/arranger, he shows us the interconnection between jazz, tango, and classical music, accomplishing what pianists who specialize rarely can, or do. Breiner, who lived in Toronto from 1992 to 2007, before moving to New York City, performs frequently in his native country. It was on one of his trips to Slovakia that he met the musicians Stano Palúch and Boris Lenko, which led to the collaboration that, eventually, produced the tango arrangements to one of Breiner’s most successful projects. In Triango, which Diego Fischerman calls “a fertile mixture of the trio-violin, accordion, and piano-and tango,” Breiner’s tango arrangements are interspersed with classical music and jazz improvisations and marvelously synchronized, with the three musicians each contributing in his unique way.

Excerpts from an essay in the event brochure, by Jadranka Vazanová, Ph.D., ethnomusicologist and editor at the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York