Astor Piazzolla
Traveling the world

In 1982 he recorded the album Oblivion with an orchestra in Italy for the film Enrico IV, directed by Marco Bellocchio, and in May 1982, in the middle of the Falklands War, he played in a concert at the Teatro Regina, Buenos Aires with the second Quinteto and the singer Roberto Goyeneche. That same year he wrote Le Grand Tango for cello and piano, dedicated to Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, which would be premiered by him in 1990 in New Orleans.

On 11 June 1983 he put on one of the best concerts of his life when he played a program of his music at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. For the occasion he regrouped the Conjunto 9 and played solo with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, directed by Pedro Ignacio Calderón. The programme included his three-movement Concierto para bandoneón y orquesta and his three-movement Concierto de Nacar.

On 4 July 1984, Piazzolla appeared with his Quinteto at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the world's largest jazz festival, and on 29 September that same year they appeared with the Italian singer Milva at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris. His concert on 15 October 1984 at the Teatro Nazionale in Milan was recorded and released as the album Suite Punta del Este. At the end of that same year he performed in West-Berlin, and in theater Vredenburg in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, where VPRO -TV-director Theo Uittenbogaard recorded his Quinteto Tango Nuevo, playing, among other pieces, a very moving Adios Nonino, with as a backdrop – to Piazzolla's great pleasure – the extremely zoomed-in "live"' projection of his bandoneon playing.

In 1985 he was named Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires and premiered his Concerto for Bandoneon and Guitar (also known as Tribute to Liège), at the Fifth International Liège Guitar Festival on March 15, with the Liège Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leo Brouwer and Cacho Tirao on guitar. Piazzolla made his London debut with his second Quinteto at the Almeida Theatre in London at the end of June.

With the film score for El exilio de Gardel he won the French critics Cesar Award in Paris for best film music in 1986.

He appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux, Switzerland, with vibraphonist Gary Burton in July 1986 and, on 6 September 1987, gave a concert in New York's Central Park, in the city where he spent his childhood.

In September 1987 he recorded his Concierto para bandoneón y orquesta and Tres tangos para bandoneón y orquesta with Lalo Schifrin conducting the St. Luke's Orchestra, in the Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University.

In 1988, he wrote music for the film Sur and married the singer and television personality Laura Escalada on April 11. In May that year he recorded his album La Camorra in New York, a suite of three pieces, the last time he would record with the second Quinteto. During a tour of Japan with Milva he played at a concert at the Nakano Sun Plaza Hall in Tokyo on June 26, 1988, and that same year underwent a quadruple by-pass operation.

Early in 1989 he formed his Sexteto Nuevo Tango, his last ensemble, with two bandoneons, piano, electric guitar, bass and cello. Together they gave a concert at the Club Italiano in Buenos Aires in April, a recording of which was issued under the title of Tres minutos con la realidad. Later he appeared with them at the Teatro Opera in Buenos Aires in the presence of the newly elected Argentine President Carlos Menem on Friday, June 9. This would be Piazzolla's last concert in Argentina.

There followed a concert at the Royal Carre Theatre in Amsterdam with his Sexteto and Osvaldo Pugliese ’s Orquesta on June 26, 1989, a live recording at the BBC Bristol Studios in June 1989, between concerts in Berlin and Rome, and a concert at the Wembley Conference Centre on June 30, 1989. On November 4, 1989, he gave a concert in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the Moulin à Danses and later that month he recorded his composition Five Tango Sensations, with the Kronos Quartet in the US on an album of the same name. This would be his last studio recording and was his second composition for the Kronos Quartet. His first Four, For Tango had been included in their 1988 album Winter Was Hard. Towards the end of the year he dissolved his sexteto and continued playing solo with classical string quartets and symphonic orchestras. He joined Anahi Carfi's Mantova String Quartet and toured Italy and Finland with them.

His 1982 composition Le grand tango, for cello and piano, was premiered in New Orleans by the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the pianist Igor Uriash in 1990 and on July 3 he gave his last concert in Athens, Greece, with the Orchestra of Colours, conducted by founder-director Manos Hatzidakis.

He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris on August 4, 1990, which left him in a coma, and died in Buenos Aires, just under two years later on July 4, 1992, without regaining consciousness.

Among his followers, the composer and pianist Fernando Otero and Piazzolla's protégé, bandoneonist Marcelo Nisinman, are the best known innovators of the tango music of the new millennium, while Pablo Ziegler, pianist with Piazzolla's second quintet, has assumed the role of principal custodian of nuevo tango, extending the jazz influence in the style. The Brazilian guitarist Sergio Assad has also experimented with folk-derived, complex virtuoso compositions that show Piazzolla's structural influence while steering clear of tango sounds; and Osvaldo Golijov has acknowledged Piazzolla as perhaps the greatest influence on his globally oriented, eclectic compositions for classical and klezmer performers.
detectable_content:number_placeholders[6], length_constraints:number_paragraphs[3]