The Tokyo Concert

This stunning live album of Astor Piazzolla was recorded at Tokyo’s Shibuya Kokaido theatre on November 21, 1982, at the close of a successful three-concert visit to Japan. After a sublime version of ‘Milonga del Angel’, while bidding a properly formal but warm-hearted farewell, Piazzolla announces: “It’s the first time that in my life that I have been given such a kind reception, with love, as the public here in Tokyo have given me. Sadly, I don’t experience this in all the countries that I visit" While there is a fair bit of Piazzolla’s trademark sentimentality here, there is also an element of quiet fury too; if the 80s were Piazzolla’s ‘mature years,’ as this re-release recording declares in its packaging, they came on the back of artistic trials and tribulations in a philistine, traditionalistic Argentina.

Perhaps it is the open-minded and generous Japanese audience, not to mention that magisterial sound engineering, that brings out the superlative performance we hear on this album: the epic and ambitious ‘Tristezas de un Doble A’, the deconstructed version of ‘La Cumparsita’ (which Piazzolla is on record as hating) and the fascinating accompaniments to Japanese tango star Ranko Fujisawa on ‘Balada para un Loco’ and ‘Chiquilín de Bachín’ The quintet, by this stage, was in its final, and finest, formation, and the best live recordings – of which this is one – combine the daring and iconoclasm of the studio albums with the intimacy and humanity required when you’re out there before the public.