3rd Tango Music Contest 'Concurso del Ocho' is open for registration

Finals : march 19 in Nijmegen during the Doble Ocho festival

New : Winner will play at the Doble Ocho festival on march 19, but also will be invited to Sitges tangofestival( Spain), Berlin Tangofestival, café Ada (Wuppertal) and other venues (conditions aply, see the concurso website)

This music contest is for amateur musicians, music students and semi-professional (tango)music groups and musicians worldwide. Concurso del Ocho want's to stimulate the creation of new innovative arrangements of existing compositions.

The participants are invited to re-arrange the song 'Buenos Aires'. (Music : Di Sarli , lyrics : Roberto Florio, Text :Manuel Romero) This song is chosen in reference of the 200 year celebrations of the existence of the Republic of Argentina in 2010. Music Score can be found here

Main Objectives
The concurso want's to stimulate and discover new musical talent and offer a podium for this talent and possibilities for a breakthrough in the professional circuit. Also the Concurso want's to be a meeting place for musicians worldwide, podium programmers, festival directors and music labels and of course tangodance and music lovers. With the professional jury the Concurso stands for quality and realises a selection in tango groups and musicians.

Jury 2009 Competition
- Dhr. Wim Warman
Piano player, Composer, teacher and trainee coordinator CODARTS Rotterdam
Pianist with Sexteto Canyengue in ’96
- Mr. Robert Schmidt
Pianist, initiated several tango groups in Berlijn such as Tango REAL and Sabor a Tango
- Mrs. Marie Cécile Moerdijk
Ethnomusicologist, Singer, Actress, Author // jury member for various competitions like the Elisabeth Concours
- Mr. Lukas Groen Composer and Conductor
- Ms. Maria José Ortiz Singer, guest teacher Rotterdam Conservatorium

New: For the 2010 edition several podia in Europe have given the intention to invite the winner of the competition. Deals have been made with Int. Tangofestival Sitges in Spain (july), café Ada in Wuppertal, Germany and in Holland De Toonzaal in Den Bosch. ( see rules )
New: Next to the main price we introduce the music stimulation price for amature musicians
(this price is for NON Conservatorium Students or semi-Profs)

Maria Fernandez and Norman Peplov, winners talent price 2009



more information :
http://www.doble-ocho.com/concurso/concurso88-eng.htm
tango@dds.nl

Tango on Unesco World Heritage list

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Tango was declared part of the world's cultural heritage by the United Nations on Wednesday and granted the international seal of approval Argentina and Uruguay have long sought for the dramatic dance and its sensual moves.

The 24 members of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee of Intangible Heritage granted the tango dance and its music protected cultural status at its meeting in Abu Dhabi.

The designation may make Argentina and Uruguay, which both claim to be tango's birthplace, eligible to receive financial assistance from a specialized fund for safeguarding cultural traditions. It will also help both governments justify using public funds to preserve their most famous export after to beef.

"We are very proud," Hernan Lombardi, the minister of culture of the autonomous city of Buenos Aires told the Associated Press on the phone from the Emirates' capital. "We hope this decision will help spread the tradition of tango all over the world."

foto : Lucien Lecarme
Tango emerged as a dance style in the late 1800s in the suburbs of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay. It is popular in Europe, Japan and the United States. The recent spike in tango's popularity throughout the world is in part attributed to the Broadway hit "Forever Tango" and TV's "Dancing With the Stars."

"Tango is a feeling that can be danced, and that feeling of course is passion," Lombardi told the AP on Wednesday.

The popular image — willowy, spike-heeled women spinning, kicking and lunging across the floor in the arms of tuxedo-clad men — is known as show tango. The kind danced in milongas, or tango dance halls, is more waltzlike, but equally sensual.

Argentina and Uruguay have long been embroiled in a clash over the birthplace of the great tango crooner Carlos Gardel. They kicked aside their differences last year in a joint effort to persuade UNESCO to list tango among UNESCO's traditions worth safeguarding for humanity.

on youtube

International tangofestival Buenos Aires honours Pugliese

The Tango Festival is a multitudinous celebration of the genre in all its varieties, and the driving force of a series of activities whose influence stretches throughout the year: the encouragement to the creation of new works, the recovery and value enhancement of the genre’s heritage, the stimulus to artistic excellence, the fostering of stylistic diversity and culture consumption, and the promotion of creative industries of the field.

The 7th Tango Festival strengthens those historical lines and establishes itself as the main showcase of the tango activity, a place where the big names of the genre and the new generations can talk freely.

Highlights
( august 15 ) Pugliese honoured
This Saturday from 8pm the stage of the Teatro Avenida will be honoured with the “Pugliese Night,” a tribute to the legendary pianist and composer, a key figure of the Argentine popular music of the 20th century. The event will gather several of the great musicians who performed with him in the different periods of the orchestra led by the unforgettable Osvaldo.

Tango dance competition
The Dance Championship is the celebration that establishes Buenos Aires as a mecca for tango dancers from all over the world. This event will choose the best dancers in the categories “Salon Tango”, which stresses the social aspect of the tango dance as a typical porteño practice, and “Stage Tango”, which aims to enrich the dance from a choreographic point of view related to the performance as a show.

Throughout the Championship, the audience will also enjoy milongas, exhibitions, free theme classes, dance shows and Works in Progress of the most prestigious companies. The spirit of the great party is already sensed.

( august 16 ) Electro tango
Tanghetto & San Telmo Lounge
The electronic touch of the milongas of the city turns into a multidisciplinary party, attended by electronic tango ensembles, dJs and dancers. The soundtrack of Buenos Aires in the 21st century.
25 agust
NARCOTANGO & OTROS AIRES


Cantadores de Tipica

In the forties, tango experienced a unique dynamism: the balance between the singer’s performance and the role of the conductor. It was a society where the artistic credits were distributed in equal parts. Singers were musically reassured by the ideas of the conductor, and thus were an equally important member of the orchestra and achieved great success, while the audience welcomed this harmonious match. The show Cantores de Típica recreates that historical moment through the singable repertoire from those days, which has been specially transcribed for the festival. The figures of the show are Alberto Podestá, Juan Carlos Godoy, Rubén Cané, Osvaldo Ribó and Lalo Martel, who will be recreating their hits with the orchestras of Miguel Caló, Pedro Laurenz, Alfredo De Angelis, Ricardo Tanturi and Angel D’Agostino. This time with a ten-musician orchestra, the audience will have once again have the opportunity to listen live to Percal, by Podestá; Papel Picado, by Ribó; Muchacho, by Cané; and Godoy and Martel will be recalling their greatest hits with De Angelis. Gabriel Soria, the author of the idea together with Cecilia Orrillo, will be hosting the show.
Sunday 16, 9pm - Teatro Avenida



22 august

HOracio Ferrer

Horacio Ferrer’s friends from four decades of appearances in the country and abroad will be singing and playing at this show whereby the whole city thanks the great lyricist for his devotion and poetry. Ever since his collection of poems Romancero Canyengue, in 1967, Horacio Ferrer stirred up the poetics of tango with his aesthetics and lyrics. He was summoned by Astor Piazzolla and later by Salgán, Tarantino, Stamponi, Garello and Aznavour, among others. He wrote Chiquilín de Bachín, La Bicicleta Blanca, Milonga del Trovador, Soy un Circo, Buenos Aires Es tu Fiesta, Renaceré, Balada para un Loco, Balada para mi Muerte, Fábula para Gardel and many more classics. His Operita (tango opera) María de Buenos Aires, premiered in 1968, is the most worldwide performed Argentine play. He gave birth to a unique style of reciting with a music accompaniment, appearing throughout Europe, the Americas and the East. Ferrer has authored over thirty books of poems and history, where his work as a researcher of the history of tango is on equal footing to his work as a poet. In 1990 he founded the Academia Nacional del Tango (Tango National Academy), with its seminars, archives and international museum, plus all the corresponding academies in the rest of the country and abroad. Medal of Honour from the University of Paris, La Sorbonne, Professor Honoris Causa from the Universidad del Salvador, Doctor Honoris Causa from the Instituto Universitario de Bellas Artes, awarded by the Festival de San Remo, Fondo Nacional de las Artes and Sociedad de Autores y Compositores.


see the full programme day by day

Buenos Aires Declares a Swine Flu Emergency

BUENOS AIRES -- The Argentine capital city, hit hard by the H1N1 flu strain, commonly known as swine flu, declared a health emergency and said it will add two weeks to school holidays in July. Argentina's Health Ministry has reported 26 swine flu deaths in the country, but local press reports indicate the toll is higher and rising, as the Southern Hemisphere winter bites hard.

Argentina ranks third in terms of confirmed swine flu deaths, behind the U.S. and Mexico, according to data from the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

The emergency declaration gives Buenos Aires city health authorities expanded power to cut through red tape to buy medical supplies or to take other measures they deem necessary. Buenos Aires officials said they would add two additional weeks, starting next Monday, to schools' winter vacations, which had previously been scheduled to start July 20 and run to the end of the month.

"I ask kids to stay in their houses and avoid large groups of people to avoid contagion," said Mayor Mauricio Macri. Authorities from surrounding, separately governed Buenos Aires province said they too were imposing the emergency measures.

The announcement in the capital came one day after federal Health Minister Graciela Ocana resigned, under fire for the government's handling of swine flu and a previous outbreak of mosquito-borne dengue fever. Argentine news reports said Ms. Ocana had recommended postponing midterm elections, but was overruled. The elections took place Sunday, and many poll workers donned surgical masks. Analysts said the swine flu problem, hitting the nation on the heels of the dengue outbreak, has laid bare inadequacies of the national health system, which has fallen victim to the country's recurrent economic crises.
Matt Mofett ( Wall street Journal )

Farewell to Pina Bausch, the dangerous magician of modern dance

Beautiful and strange, tragic yet hopeful, Pina Bausch's creations entranced the audience. The news of her death is terribly sad – and a challenge for dance-makers.
Anger and danger ... The Rite of Spring at Sadler's Wells in 2008. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
You can count on one hand the number of modern-dance-makers who have changed the landscape – and Pina Bausch was one of them. Even though she never created a style that could be taught in the classroom, as Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham did, her influence went far and deep. It's now impossible to enumerate the hundreds of works heavily indebted to her unique brand of dance theatre, trying to imitate Bausch's surreal voyages into memory, pleasure and pain. Even those who hated her productions never forgot them.

Bausch believed passionately in choreography but her works were not primarily about dance. She wove her material out of movement, speech, theatrical imagery and music, often starting out with no more than a feeling. She worked closely with her dancers, drawing on their own fantasies and experiences; in her darkest works, Bausch was famously accused by New Yorker critic Arlene Croce for indulging in a "pornography of pain". Not only did her productions feature brutally explicit confessionals, with the dancers spewing out shocking revelations of misery, hatred or desire, some of the choreography was so angry and dangerous that the performers seemed quite literally at risk of damaging themselves.

It was a formula that many choreographers imitated, but few came even close to achieving. There was a combination of terror, beauty, strangeness and even bawdy comedy in the worlds that she and her designers invented, from The Rite of Spring, in which the floor of the stage was covered in dark peat, to Nelken, where it was carpeted with carnations. In Victor, 20ft walls of mud flanked the dancers, so that they appeared like a lost tribe unearthed in an archaeological dig. It was the monumental magic of Bausch's productions that inspired and won assorted devoted followers including stage directors such as David Alden and film directors such as Federico Fellini and Pedro Almodóvar.

The first time Bausch and her company performed in London, back in 1984, audiences felt they had never seen anything like it. (Some wished they hadn't; every night, half the theatre walked out.) But she became a cult. Fans travelled the world, following their favourite productions. Dancers queued up to audition for her company. And while Bausch's most recent productions may have lacked the intransigent vision of her greatest works, they never lost the capacity to amaze and entrance.

Her last performance in London was a double bill of early work, The Rite of Spring and Café Müller, which drew on Bausch's childhood memories of her parents' boarding house in Solingen, north Germany. It was a performance that I was meant to be reviewing on the night. But sitting at my computer, still reeling from the savage dread and ecstasy that had been generated in Rite, still haunted by the indefinable mix of tragedy and hopefulness in Café Müller, I kept forgetting the ticking of the clock. I kept forgetting to write.

For the world of dance, news of Bausch's premature death is a terrible sadness. It's also a terrible challenge. Many of her productions have been recorded for video, but that's not the same as seeing them live. The urgent task for her colleagues and her dancers is to ensure that at least some of them survive for the theatre too.
Judith Mackrell
The Guardian

Al Di Meola explores tango's Italian roots

As a precocious teenager, Al Di Meola cut his musical teeth playing guitar with Chick Corea's pioneering electric band Return to Forever, which he joined in 1974. The instrumental quartet created a potent and propulsive mix out of rock, Latin music, and jazz, and the guitarist's debut with the group, Where Have I Known You Before, quickly became one of the classics of fusion. Di Meola performed with RTF for a couple of years, then created his own group, writing tunes inspired by Corea's multifaceted approach.



“Of the three fusion groups that started the movement—Return to Forever, Mahavishnu [Orchestra], and Weather Report—thanks to Chick I think we were the strongest compositionally,” says Di Meola, reached in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he was born and raised. “Playing strong and challenging instrumental pieces really helped form the growth period for my own way of composing.”

But in time Di Meola came to realize that fusion just wasn't moving him. “The music didn't hit my heart,” he says. “It didn't bring me to the depths of the feelings I might get from certain classical music, or what I experienced when I first heard Astor Piazzolla.”

Di Meola met the late Argentine master of nuevo tango when both were touring Japan in 1985. “Everyone in his group was very warm. It was like meeting long-lost friends or my Italian relatives. His dates and mine often coincided. We kept talking and hanging out, and developed a strong friendship. Piazzolla's music was so emotionally wide-ranging and at the same time technically difficult and challenging. He promised to send some charts and a piece to do my own thing with.”

Di Meola recorded “Tango Suite” with the first edition of World Sinfonia, the band he formed to take his original music in more of an acoustic, global, and soulful direction, and to explore the new possibilities opened up for him by Piazzolla. “World Sinfonia primarily plays my own compositions, but I can't picture ever not doing some Piazzolla, because it's so close to me.”


The two artists found much in common. Both had parents who emigrated from Italy, and as a boy Piazzolla spent seven years in New York. The Argentine master revealed something his compatriots would rather keep quiet.

“Piazzolla told me tango originated in Napoli [Naples] and at first had nothing to do with Argentina, though it developed there. That resonated strongly with me because the connection is very profound—and here I am now with two Italians in World Sinfonia. Our music is a combination of jazz improvisation and many different Latin rhythms, which we syncopate. That distinguishes it from other renditions of tango. It has all that I always liked most in fusion but on a much wider palette.”

Al Di Meola's World Sinfonia plays the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Monday (June 29).

written By Tony Montague
source

Tango Pianists Rotterdam CODARTS appreciated !

Maria Martinova en Barbara Varrassi graduated from CODARTS

These 2 fine tango musicians have graduated from the Rotterdam Conservatory, section Argentine Tango ( CODARTS )

Maria Martinova
Maria Martinova

(Info about Maria from the website www.otra-rotterdam.nl:)
Born in Varna, Bulgaria, Maria began playing the piano at the age of seven, inspired by a rich heritage of musicians and artists in her family. She completed her early training at the Varna School of Music and Arts, finishing with the highest distinction prior to being accepted at the Bulgarian National Conservatory. Her studies there were interrupted after only two years by an invitation to attend the Juilliard School in New York City, where she was accepted as a recipient of the Vladimir Horowitz Scholarship. At Juilliard she studied with Yoheved Kaplinsky and Joseph Kalichstein, as well as Felix Galimir, Albert Fuller and Samuel Sanders. Maria holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Juilliard and a Master of Music degree from the Royal Academy of Music, where she was a student of Hamish Milne and won the Foundation and the Leverhulme Awards. She also taught on behalf of the Royal Academy of Music for several years.

more about Maria Martinova


Barbara Varassi Pega
Info about Barbara in Dutch from the website www.otra-rotterdam.nl :
Bárbara Varassi Pega (Argentinië) volgde haar opleiding piano in Argentinië en aan het conservatorium van Milaan te Italië. Ze specialiseerde zich in de Argentijnse tango onder leiding van de maestro J. Martinez Lo Re. Ze toerde door heel Europa en Zuid-Amerika met vele verschillende groepen, o.a. met de International Company "Buenos Aires Tango".

http://www.myspace.com/barbaratangotinto