Lilia Salsano Anglo-Tango: A Piano Recital of Tangos by British Composers

Echoes Festival of Ibero-American Classical Music, with the support of the Cervantes Institute, presents Lilia Salsano and her concert ‘Anglo-Tango: Recital of tangos for piano by British composers’ Despite how it sounds, the notion of 'Anglo-Tango' is perhaps not entirely the oxymoron it might seem. This programme of tangos for solo piano, written exclusively by 20th-century and living British classical composers, offers not only an idiosyncratic exercise in musical border-crossing, but also opens a window onto the particularly British iterations of the longstanding infatuation the tango has engendered globally since the first international tango craze of the 1910s. These tangos, on the one hand displaying a broad and eclectic range of highly individualistic and innovative approaches to the genre, also reveal British composers in dialogue with each other, forging something approaching a collective national tango style. Spanning almost a century, they range from Walton's precedent-setting 'Tango-Pasodoble' to contributions by other grandees of British composition such as Rodney Bennett, Finnissy, Nyman and Birtwistle, alongside a plethora of other pre-eminent names from the British contemporary classical canon. Returning this gesture of cultural diplomacy and bringing some indigenous verve to the programme is the virtuoso Argentine pianist, Lilia Salsano, who performs the programme live for the first time in the UK following the original digital Echoes Festival performance in 2021