I associate the Alban Berg Quartet with very traditional—“high fiber,” if you will—performances of German and Austrian classics, so, when I opened the package from Tenafly and saw the ABQ’s name on this release, I couldn’t help feeling vaguely uneasy. I shouldn’t have worried. First, the presence of bandoneón player Per Arne Glorvigen and double bassist Alois Posch suggested that experienced Piazzollists were watching over the proceedings. (Both appeared on Gidon Kremer’s excellent Hommage à Piazzolla CD back in 1996—Nonesuch 79407-2). Second, and more important, it is condescending to assume that the Quartet can’t play Piazzolla, and it is equally condescending to imply that Piazzolla’s music somehow “can’t stand up” to performers of the Quartet’s seriousness and caliber. Piazzolla actually wrote his Tango Sensations for a string quartet with bandoneón anyway, so there isn’t even a reason to grumble about arrangements. However, I will grumble that when Nonesuch released an “EP” of Piazzolla himself playing the Tango Sensations with the Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79254-2), there was an additional movement—the second one, titled “Loving.” Where is it? Not on this CD.

Kurt Schwertsik was born in 1935, and his Adieu Satie “makes surreal glosses on characteristic moments, moods, and thoughts in the works of the enigmatic French composer,” in the more or less apt words of annotator Simon Wright. Its five movements are “Parade,” “Darius en vacances,” “Le coq et l’Arlequin,” “Gymnopédie,” and “Clownerie acrobatique.” I have not decided how I feel about Adieu Satie, except that it seems like weak stuff compared to the Piazzolla (to say nothing of Satie). It’s cute. I just don’t expect it to haunt my sleepless nights.

It was a happy idea to let Glorvigen play three solo tangos between the Tango Sensations and the Schwertsik. The three composers were tango stars of their day, and it was their example that Piazzolla followed—and eventually went way beyond—as he matured as a composer.

The engineers capture the feel of a live occasion, and one senses that the audience is responding to and likes what it is hearing. So do I.

Raymond Tuttle, FANFARE