Ophélie Gaillard on Cello Tango

Dance has become something of a running theme throughout French cellist Ophélie Gaillard's recent discography, with albums devoted to the nightlife of London and Naples taking in jigs, tarantellas and more. Her latest project Cello Tango (released on Aparté in April) ventures further afield to Argentina and Uruguay to explore music by Piazzolla, Ginastera, Gardel and others, with sizzling support from seasoned tangueros Juanjo Mosalini, William Sabatier and Tomás Bordalejo.

Ophélie spoke to me last month about her first encounter with tango music during a visit to the Argentinian capital, the new techniques which she had to embrace in order to do this music justice, her feelings about the many depictions of tango in mainstream cinema, and why she believes that the milonga is the ideal place to let off some steam after a concert...

When did you first fall under the spell of tango?

It all began in Buenos Aires, which is the most important city for tango along with Montevideo. I was doing a tour of solo concerts and some dates with my baroque group Ensemble Amaryllis, and whilst I was in BA I had the chance to go to a tango concert. I was blown away by the levels of musicality and virtuosity from all the players, and I just fell in love with tango there and then.

Mastering the style is really challenging for a lot of classically-trained musicians, but most of the tango players are used to playing classical music – they’d start the evening playing at the Teatro Colón and finish it by playing in a milonga to earn more money! 

What special challenges does this music pose for string-players from a classical background?

There are so many tricks which you have to learn if you’re going to have the right technical vocabulary for this music. Tango requires a special bowing technique to produce the sound: you hold the bow by the frog [the base] and have to be really quite violent with your fingers and arm! And as a bass or cello-player, you must master a technique called arrastres, which Romain Lecuyer (our bass-player on the album) taught me: it’s basically a very fast, rough glissando which involves both hands, so the bow whooshes up the string at the same time as the left hand shifts the pitch.

The virtuosic passages can be extremely fast, so you need to be very efficient with the left hand. Another thing which is very specific to this music is the approach to rubato. It’s challenging because it’s so different from the way you do rubato in Chopin, for example – the piano maintains a very steady rhythm and the other musicians play with the borders around it. It’s completely unique to tango. If you listen to some tango albums from classical musicians, they’re often quite interesting on their own terms but they’re not authentic: if any one of those elements is missing it all becomes too strict.

The percussive effects which you create on the album are really striking (no pun intended)…

Exactly, and that’s very meaningful because there are no actual percussion instruments in a milonga – everybody’s involved in creating those effects. The bass, the piano, and sometimes the cello and violin are really supposed to replace the rhythm section through techniques like chicarra (playing where the string meets the bridge), latigo (a whip-like effect with the bow) and tambor (where you basically use the body of the instrument as a drum). And of course the heels of the dancers play their part too...

Has dance always been an interest of yours?

When I did my first recording of the Bach cello suites I got very interested in how we form connections between the body and mind in performance. As with any music that has its roots in dance, it’s so important to feel the rhythms in your body and to communicate that to your audience: it’s like a new harmonious language that you need to learn. It was the same with a lot of the music on my Neapolitan album, and with the Irish and Scottish tunes on the London album - they’re all absolutely intended as dances, and we need to convey that in performance and recording.

Have you had formal tango-lessons?

Yes, I’ve been doing that for a few years now: it’s quite challenging because tango dancers are crazy, even more than musicians! I enjoy dancing salsa too, but salsa is entertainment – tango is not entertainment, it’s something very serious! It’s on their mind all day, every day (and night!). But I think I’m a better player since I learned to dance this music; I came to understand so many things about rubato and rhythm through dancing. It’s really poetic.

When you’re juggling tours and a family life it’s hard to find time to do some sport – the best solution is yoga because you can do it from any hotel-room in the world, but I think tango comes a close second for a musician. If you’re playing in a big city you can nearly always find a tango place, and because they’re open late you can head over after your concert: it’s always difficult to sleep after a performance anyway, so it’s perfect. 

Was there a particular composer or piece which sparked the idea for the project?

It’s important to point out that the heart of the album is Alberto Ginastera, whose music I’ve adored for a long time. I fell in love with his piece Puneña when I was about fifteen after hearing Rostropovich playing and speaking about it, and the much-missed Antonio Meneses was also a wonderful advocate. Ginastera is really interesting as a composer and personality, because he was so inspired by Argentinian musical traditions but he never stopped questioning and reinventing them - you can hear that so clearly in the two pieces I’ve chosen for the album. I’ve always been a player who’s fascinated by learning old traditions and discovering new things, and I think that’s why I connected with him at such a young age. I liked the way he explored and even exploded the instrument: to do his music justice, you have to be like a guitar, a singer, a percussionist rather than just a cellist!

Sometimes it’s an individual song which grabs me, sometimes it’s a composer or even a particular orchestra. The 1930s-1950s were a golden age of tango, with so many great ensembles emerging, all with very distinctive sounds: you only have to hear three notes to know exactly who’s playing. I did a lot of research on all of this with William Sabatier and Juanjo Mosalini, the bandoneon players on the album: they know everything there is to know about the tango tradition and the specific sub-styles within it, but at the same time they’re always creating something fresh.

When they arrange a song by Carlos Gardel or Julián Plaza, it’s not a remake or a cover-version: it’s a completely new piece that’s inspired by the original. That attitude is why tango is so exciting and alive today, and of course improvisation plays a big part in that - there are so many moments in this music where you have the space to speak out as yourself, and I’ve always loved that. The genre is constantly evolving, as we’ve seen through the amazing work of the Gotan Project over the past two decades.

Representations of tango in cinema are fairly plentiful, from Scent of a Woman to True Lies - do you feel filmmakers often misrepresent the genre, or are those on-screen depictions typically fairly accurate?

I don’t really take issue with those clichés, because there’s almost always an element of truth in them! Films often associate tango with bad boys from the mean city streets, and in a way that’s authentic – all tango is not like that, but it certainly comes from that urban working-class background. One cliché which we can dismiss with confidence is the trope of the gaucho who turns out to be a master tanguero, when the dance really comes from the suburbs of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. You can’t find any tango-dancers or musicians in the pampas – it’s nonsense! But so many films featuring tango understand its connections with desperate love, sensuality and sexuality: look at Sur (which features music by Piazzolla) and Last Tango in Paris. So I’m not precious about how it’s depicted in cinema: it’s a window anybody can enter to fall in love with this style of music.