A Evaristo Carriego - Ray Chen & Julio Elizalde

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Hey there!

So to give you all a little bit of background on how and why this piece came about…

Julio and I were performing a series of recitals at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires last year (in 2017) and on one of our nights off, we visited a tango club. It was one of those super old school places where you ate dinner in front of a stage and then afterwards, the lights would go dark, and would you enjoy and amazing show of musicians, singers, and of course dancers doing tango!

It was incredible. I remember being so inspired by the passion and energy in the movements of the dancers, and even more astonished by the musicians themselves (there were so many cool techniques that they used which we don’t really get to in classical music, I’ll address those later) that Julio and I decided to make our own arrangement of a tango called “A Evaristo Carriego” which was originally composed by Eduardo Rovira (Evaristo Carriego was a very famous Argentine poet). Such a work is usually played by a tango band which consists of one or two violins, a bandoneon, piano, guitar, and double bass. That’s at least 5-6 musicians so it was a challenge to try and fit in all that music and emotion into just two players!

TECHNIQUES TO LOOK OUT FOR: There are many techniques that are used in tango by the musicians and we use a few of them in this video. The guttural sound that you hear that basically provides the beat and bass is usually done by a bass player and it’s called the “Zoom” (Julio here does it with those quick and vicious broken chords with his left hand) Then you have the “vibrato” of the bandoneon player which I try to imitate in 02:27 (that’s not me with an unintentional nervous/shakey bow folks!)
Just before that part there’s a moment at 02:02 where I swipe the piano with my hand. This is actually meant to be done to the back or front of the violin by the violinist. I’m not sure what it’s called but the sound is exactly the same. I saw it done at the tango club and my jaw hit the floor. I’m not sure how the Stradivarius would react to me if I did that.

There are many other things but honestly, the secret to tango is in thinking the movement of the dancers. If you like this video please subscribe, I will share my inspiration in the next video with this piece and you’ll understand exactly what I mean :)

Thanks for listening!

Ray Chen

Recorded in Harrisonburg, VA [Forbes Center] on February 20th, 2018
Arranged and performed by Ray Chen & Julio Elizalde