MARIO STEFANO PIETRODARCHI – bandoneon
LUCA LUCINI – guitar
Here they are: daring, smiling, slouching. They are moving towards us high and mighty like the Magi, full of unheard-of sonorous beauties. Two Tani doc. El Tano, “the Italian”, was a widespread nickname among the Italians in Argentina in the earliest XXth Century. Luca Lucini and Mario Stefano Pietrodarchi, like the ancient emigrants who landed in the warm and turbid air of Buenos Aires, are hungry for life and love for the tango (besides being fond of football – another indispensable factor for those who want to make music with fantasy and passion). They did not need to cross the ocean in order to meet the clammy and unscrupulous sounds of the tango. They found them on their skin, like a name scrawled on a piece of paper and thrown into the cradle before being abandoned among the orphans. Lucini and Pietrodarchi have got a strong, fascinating, more and more singular capability: that of creating a music made of looks, complicity, blinkings, abandons, sincerity, certainties. They believe in what they do, they believe in the feeling they find hidden in the staves, they believe in the truths discovered in the music they play. They come up with it with such conviction and persuasiveness that it is difficult not to agree with them.
They do not seem only great: you are listening to them and you feel they are the greatest. But their greatness does not constrict: it complements. They enjoy alternately and amuse each other: please, after you…thank you, it’s my turn. Together now…wait a moment…here I am, thanks, please, again, and lose themselves…
Never, as in them, making music has meant amusement, abandoning any reticence, pure joy. They enjoy the sounds their thoughts shape and they move the audience, give themselves to the rage and the sweetness of the tango – passing from inaudible whispers to belling out. They allow themselves pauses and rests which last brief lifetimes.
They let light come into the music, they throw open some chinks in the scores: the notes one by one? An alchemy of questions, answers and movements are born. Funereal and orgiastic dances at the same time. In the slow times you feel desperation, rage, shout, eagerness for ransom. They are not afraid of exaggerating, they are not ashamed of laughing and crying like children who make music the same way they play, they are not ashamed of being mistaken for naive, immodest, too sincere, unarmed, naked – with their arms wide open, their head bent and their face shaken by hiccups (like in The Bad Lieutenant by Abel Ferrara): waiting for some miracle to happen.
A. Piazzolla
Oblivion
Adios nonino
Ausencias
A. Ramirez
Alfonsina y el mar
F. Canaro
Canaro en Paris
M. Falloni
Jewel
Felix Tango
A. Piazzolla
Ave Maria
A. Villoldo
El choclo