Taking Tango a Step Further

Osvaldo Requena is on a mission. He wants to prove to the world that tango isn’t as simple as it might appear.

“I’ve done extensive research on many different kinds of music,” said the artistic director of the internationally renowned company Tango Buenos Aires during a recent telephone conversation from his Argentina home.

“Tango goes beyond the simple little chorus [of any pop song] that you hum along to. The tangos from the classic era have three clearly defined separate sections, like a sonatina in classical music.”

Acclaimed tanguero Requena will bring his show, “The Song of Buenos Aires,” to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts for four performances beginning Thursday.

Touring are a six-piece ensemble, 25-year-old singer Karina Rivera and 12 dancers. The sextet includes two bandoneons (the large, accordion-like instrument that creates the trademark sound of the genre), violin, cello, bass and Requena on piano.

The program aims to show that tango is much more than the stereotype perpetuated in Hollywood movies--that of a stiff, over-sexualized Latino couple dancing rigidly without cracking a smile--by illustrating the development of tango from 1905 to the present.

The concert will begin with the most famous of all tangos, “La Cumparsita” and continue with compositions by such masters of the genre as Anibal Troilo, Mariano Mores and Astor Piazzolla, plus a couple by Requena.

Yet even as the dance has metamorphosed through the years, its intrinsically melancholy character has remained unchanged. All tangos seem drenched in nostalgia.

“Most Argentinians are the children of immigrants--Spaniards and Italians who abandoned their countries at a very young age,” Requena said. “I think we have inherited their sense of nostalgia.

“Tango was born in the banks of the river, where the immigrants and the blacks who were brought over as slaves congregated at the beginning of the century,” he said.

“Their music is very sad by nature, just like the spirituals in North America are sad. It’s interesting to notice that tango comes from two words--tambor [drum] and tambo [dairy farm], where the immigrants would get together and talk about their homeland.”

In the beginning, tango was synonymous with the lowlife of Buenos Aires, with brothels and fights between thugs. But after it was accepted as a popular dance in Europe, tango spread to every corner of Buenos Aires, becoming the perpetual soundtrack of a gray metropolis.

The man responsible for creating a tango craze outside of Argentina in the ‘60s and ‘70s was composer-bandoneonist Piazzolla. A classically trained musician, he merged traditional tango with jazz and classical music, making it more palatable for young people.

In Cerritos, Requena’s ensemble will perform two examples from Piazzolla’s seminal output, the gorgeous “Verano Porteno” (Buenos Aires Summer) and “Melancolico Buenos Aires” (Melancholy Buenos Aires).

Requena is a Piazzolla fan, albeit with a few reservations.

“During the ‘50s, Piazzolla was the arranger for the big tango orchestras of Anibal Troilo and Osvaldo Pugliese,” he said. “Interestingly, I prefer Piazzolla as an arranger more than as a composer. But he was the one who managed to export tango into the whole world. Personally, I prefer the golden age of tango, before the ‘40s. I find the songs from that era to possess an amazing melodic richness.

“My favorite one is ‘El Andariego’ [The Wanderer], maybe because I am a wanderer myself, having traveled to 61 countries,” Requena said.

“I also like that tune because it was the one I used to hum in the streets of Buenos Aires when I went to visit my first girlfriend, the woman who is standing next to me right now and is my wife of 41 years. You can understand why that particular tango is very close to my heart.”

* Tango Buenos Aires presents “The Song of Buenos Aires” at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. 8 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday. $27-$42. (800) 300-4345.