"My main style is to have studied. If I had not, I would not be doing what I do, what I’ve done. Because everybody thinks that to do a ‘modern tango’ is to make noise, is to make strange thoughts, and no, that’s not true! You have to go a little deeper, and you can see that what I do is very elaborate. If I do a fugue in the manner of Bach, it will always be ‘tanguificated’."

Astor Piazzola was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921 to Italian parents, and raised on the streets of New York. Piazzola is best known for making the "Tango" a classical art form. His "new tango" (as he often referred to it) reflects the multiplicity of cultural influences with which he came in contact as a child. He began his musical career playing the "bandoneon" - a type of concertina - first performing classical music on the radio in New York, and later as a "tanguero" in the cabarets of Buenos Aires.

Piazzolla’s "new tango" is a sophisticated mix of the tango, jazz, and classical influences -- which turned the world of the classical tango in a completely new direction when his first serious compositions appeared in the 1950s. His "new tango" met, at first with resistance, offending some purists by his adulteration of tango rhythms and introducing foreign elements into what Argentines considered to be a near-sacred national music. Piazzolla has often been charged with attempting to "kill" the classical tango by mixing in these foreign influences, tainting with the outside world what was once considered "pure".

However, what Piazzolla did was to reinfuse and revitalize the tango with the passion and primitiveness it once had and to liberate it from the stuffiness of the old fashioned drawing rooms and ballrooms. "Presidents change, and they say nothing . . . bishops change, soccer players, anything, but not the tango. The tango is to be kept like it is: old, boring, always the same, repeated."

Such limitations forced him to re-examine the once stately and powerful tango, then to reinvent, change and redefine it. At the urging of pianist Arthur Rubinstein - to whom the young Piazzolla had shown one of his early compositions - he began to study with the Argentine composer Albert Ginastera, eventually winning, in 1954, a French scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. It was Boulanger who guided Piazzolla back to his Argentinean roots and the tango:

"When I met her, I showed her my kilos of symphonies and sonatas. She started to read them and suddenly came out with a horrible sentence: ‘It’s very well written.’ After a long while, she said: ‘Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartok, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can’t find Piazzolla in this.’ I was very ashamed to tell her that I was a bandoneon player, [but] finally I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. Suddenly she opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: "You idiot, that’s Piazzolla!". And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds."

After his studies with Boulanger, Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires and began to perform his new music, the "Nuevo Tango" with his own ensembles - using new combinations of instruments, reworking the traditional tango rhythms and song forms, introducing such rogue elements as the cello and electric guitar, and eliminating the vocalists and dancers which were typically part of the traditional tango performance.

Although Piazzolla’s Nuevo Tango was highly criticized (the military junta condemned it as too avant-garde) Piazzolla’s new sound found an enthusiastic audience among young Argentines. The enthusiasm soon spread to the rest of the world with Piazzolla’s recordings and concert appearances in Europe in the 1970s and ‘80s. His vision and love of the simple tango has breathed life back into the genre, winning new adherents for tango music amongst classical and popular audiences alike. Piazzolla died in Buenos Aires in 1992 at the age of 71.

The 3 Pieces for Piano Trio are individual tangos arranged by Josi Bragato, originally for The Ahn Trio.