Tangos from Buenos Aires (LP)

Daniel Barenboim as a tango pianist - for the first time on vinyl "Even as a child I was crazy about tango. I still am," said Daniel Barenboim, acknowledging his musical roots with the album Tangos Among Friends. To mark the 80th birthday of the famous Argentinian-Jewish conductor and pianist, Warner Classics is reissuing this legendary recording from the 90s: For sound purists on vinyl, the recording is now being released under the new title: Tangos from Buenos Aires. Barenboim spent the first nine years of his life growing up in Argentina. "The air I breathed was Buenos Aires, the language I spoke was Spanish porteño (Buenos Aires dialect) and the rhythm I danced to - figuratively speaking - was the tango!" says the conductor. For decades, he played tango arrangements solely for the pleasure of his friends, never in public. But then the conductor returned to Buenos Aires in 1995 for a concert with the Staatskapelle Berlin and met local tango musicians. "The first day we played just for fun", recalls Barenboim, "then we decided to make a recording". This is how the newly released recording came about, which celebrates tango great Astor Piazzolla as well as Barenboim's idol, Carlos Gardel. Barenboim says of his two collaborators, the musicians Mederos and Console: "What they gave me was a real feeling for the tango". Forty years after turning his back on Buenos Aires, the world-class conductor realized that he was still imbued with the soft tango rhythm right down to his fingertips.