It's mainly tourists who meet up at the big expensive tango clubs in Buenos Aires, to watch a spot-lit stage with an extravagantly staged spectacle that would be more appropriate for a Broadway theatre in New York. Real tango dancers (tanguera and tanguero) meet up in Buenos Aires at milongas, to dance there, and there of course the melodies from the early days and the Golden Age around 1920 still have their place, even today. In the milongas of the "barrios" (city precincts) in which the tango arose at the end of the 19th century, this music is a way of life. In the milongas there's no division – here the artists on the stage, there the audience in the auditorium. One meets, knowing the melodies and rhythms, so as to dance. A night like this, where simple, moving music is made, is no concert. You rarely get to hear "Tango Nuevo" there. "Tango Nuevo" is more at home in the concert halls and performance spaces. After a European Piazzolla concert – in the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, for example – culture consumers dressed in black are in the habit of arguing about whether what they just heard was an avant-garde concert. But in Buenos Aires it's quite different: it's about the people in a precinct, their feeling for life, and about songs that were always their songs, and still are, however ambitious they may be. Tango is living nostalgia. The latter term derives from the Greek words 'nostos' (return, going home, past) and 'algos' (pain), and in no other tango is this more movingly and convincingly turned into music than in "Volver", from 1935. But there are always new tango songs. Andrés Linetzky is one of the rising tango composers. He leads Vale Tango, and it's around Vale Tango that this album »Live at La Viruta« revolves. Cecilia Troncoso, Luis Solanas and Horacio Godoy created La Viruta, a quite extraordinary milonga. It's a place where famous tango dancers teach in the late afternoon, and at night tangueras and tangueros dance, till at daybreak they change their blood-soaked high heels for sneakers, so that they can return to everyday life. Andrés Linetzky composes tangos for these milongas. Along with the arrangements to heard on this album, the instrumental pieces "Cuando jugaba", "Bravo Vittorio!" and "Fogo" are all penned by him. The text for Linetzky's "Entonces" ("At That Time") is written by the famous Argentinean author Maria Elena Walsh. From 1952 to1956 she is living in Paris, since she was under threat from the Perón dictatorship. One of the people she meets in Paris is Leda Valladares, and they sing Argentinean folk music together as a duo. After returning, and until the reintroduction of democracy in 1983, she is in constant conflict with the military dictatorship's censorship office, though her popularity gives her some protection. In the press she rails against censorship, prejudice, authoritarian structures, the death sentence, and the disadvantaging of women. Even if her subjects are specific, she often treats her material so artistically as to produce texts that are valid for ever. Since 1959, she is writing not just poems, but film scripts, theatre pieces, and songs – especially children's songs – that have a huge circulation in Argentina. In her songs for adults she blurs the distinctions between folksong and art song. Her songs are folk-like but poetic. And thus she leads poetry back into times long past, where poetry was not recited, but sung. "Entonces" tells of love fulfilled. Along with his own compositions, Andrés Linetzky has selected a few really wonderful tangos and tango waltzes, and arranged them for his ensemble with two violins and two bandoneons. So we hear Agustín Bardi's "Lorenzo", Osvaldo Pugliese "El frenopatico", and also the famous song "Volver" with its text by Alfredo Le Pera and its music by Carlos Gardel, the original recording of which was declared by UNESCO to be a World Heritage Document. In one of the first of Winter&Winter's AudioFilms, »¡Tango Vivo!« from 1997, a still very young pianist and composer Andrés Linetzky is one of the participants. In 1998 follows the album »Tango alla Baila«, with the group Tangata Rea; even back then, Linetzky is underlining his attachment to milongas. He records the music for »Musicás de Noche« with the Vale Tango group in Bordeaux in 2001. Andrés Linetzky, born in 1974 in Avellaneda, in the Buenos Aires province, has Russian-Jewish roots. His grandfather José comes from Beltz, a place that at various times has 'belonged' to Russia, to Poland, to Halytsch-Wolhynien, to the Austrian empire, later Austria-Hungary, to Galicia, then to Romania, to Moldavia, back to Poland, to the USSR, and these days to Ukraine. It's actually not surprising that Andrés Linetzky plays authentic klezmer with his grandfather José, his father Leo, and his brothers Andres, Bruno, Mati and Guille. His greatest passion, though, is the tango, the music of his home territory. For his appearance at La Viruta in October 2008 Andrés Linetzky, who plays piano himself, invited the musicians Alejandro Schaikis [violin], Luis Sava [violin], Federico Pereiro [bandoneon], Nicolás Capsitski [bandoneon] and Nicolás Zacarías [double bass], all of whom he has had close ties with for years, and played successfully with them. Added to this instrumental ensemble are the three voices of Lidia Borda, Ariel Ardit and Claudio Garces. Lidia Borda is one of the best known singers from Buenos Aires. Appearances at festivals in Europe and concert tours in America and Europe have gained her a big audience outside of Argentina. And with Ariel Ardit and Claudio Garces, Andrés Linetzky presents two generations of singers. Ariel Ardit is one of the young, strong voices in tango, and Claudio Garces embodies the longing of Volver: "Coming back, voice withered, the snows of time make my sleep pale. To feel that life is just a breath, that twenty years are nothing, that the feverish gaze, running through shadows, is seeking you and calls to you." »Vale Tango live at La Viruta« is an AudioFilm about the enchanting music, the stirring atmosphere, and the common people from Buenos Aires who come to this milonga, and change their shoes so as to step for a few hours into paradise.
