La Próxima Traición

Tango has always reflected society – especially Buenos Aires’ urban society, but also, at various times, that of Paris, New York and even Milan – in its timbres, motifs and melodies. If American Ben Bogart (bandoneón) and Hong Kong-born Winnie Cheung (piano) come to the genre as outsiders, they are rigorous virtuosos, studying the tradition closely and, to record this album, basing themselves in the Argentinian capital.

This cycle of 11 songs is mainly made up of standards, including golden era classics like ‘La Yumba’, ‘Desde el Alma’ and ‘Comme il Faut’, but the duo accent the clamorous and angular aspects of tango, perhaps to reflect our discordant times. While they are only a twosome, their instruments could fill a roomy dance floor, piano and bandoneón embracing and colliding and then pulling apart like two sympathetic but single-minded dancers.

The result is mainly mental rather than milonga-friendly music, though you can imagine a solitary COVID-19 locked-down tanguero enjoying an intense coupling with these astringent and aggressive shapes. Bogart has played with maestros of the calibre of Néstor Marconi and Rodolfo Mederos, and his squeezebox is by turns lyrical and imperious. Cheung rather hammers at the keys, which foregrounds passion and percussiveness at the expense of subtlety – an approach that works best on rousing numbers. The missing strings leave a void on ‘Milonga del Ángel’, but otherwise, this is a good example of less being more.