The allure of tango music drew an eager audience to the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center Friday night for a concert by QuinTango, the Virginia-based tango ensemble that has been visiting Island schools over the past week.
Before presenting their own program of classic and modern tango compositions, the group’s members performed with and conducted student musicians they’ve been working with during QuinTango’s residency, which was sponsored by the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society.
Opening the show, Quintango joined more than a dozen members of the all-Island middle school orchestra to play a classic tango from the 1920s, A Media Luz by Edgardo Donato.
With performers from the high school orchestra, the group played Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango, a pulsing 1974 piece by the classically-trained Argentine composer and bandoneon player whose “neuvo tango” took the genre from dance halls to concert stages in the late 20th century.
The bandoneon — a member of the concertina family of bellows instruments, with a square body and buttons on each end — is essential to the true tango sound, and QuinTango’s bandoneon player comes from the music’s birthplace, Buenos Aires.
Joan Singer, Regino Madrid, Susanna Mendlow
— Ray Ewing
Wearing a red cowboy hat, Emmanuel Trifilio played bandoneon in the classic style, with one foot on a stool and the center of the instrument resting on his raised knee as he squeezed and pulled out reedy, rippling melodies above the lush, orchestral strings of cellist Susanna Mendlow and violinists Regino Madrid and Joan Singer.
Pianist Julie Huang Tucker and bassist Ali Cook provided the rhythmic pulse, and also sang on a pair of unexpected numbers: Aspiration, a collaboration by Ms. Cook and a group of formerly imprisoned women whose poetry forms the song’s lyrics, and an arrangement by Ms. Cook of Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me To the End of Love.
The ensemble also played Piazzolla’s Esqualo and Milongo del Angel, as well as works by his contemporary Julián Plaza and an earlier Argentine composer, Roberto Firpo, and several 21st-century tangos by Mr. Trifilio.
Julie Huang Tucker of Quintango conducting the high school orchestra.
— Ray Ewing
Mr. Trifilio’s piece Feriado, which also featured vocals by Ms. Huang Tucker and Ms. Cook, is part of this year’s National Public Radio Tiny Desk Concert contest, Ms. Singer told the audience.
A pair of professional dancers, Analía Centurion and Svetislav Vuletić, joined the ensemble for two numbers, displaying intricate foot and leg work as they tangoed back and forth across the stage.
Ms. Centurion is QuinTango’s dance master, Ms. Singer said, and Mr. Vuletić is a 16-year-old tango master from Boston.
During Quintango’s Island residency, the chamber music society teamed up with The Yard to offer public tango classes with Ms. Centurion, including one following Friday’s free concert.
