Additional performance
7 Mar 8:00pm
Booking starts from 5 Dec at URBTIX

"If, when you hear a tango that is played well, you don't feel your chest tremble, find something else to do with your time." Carlos García (piano)

"You can't separate tango from life." José "Pepe" Libertella (bandoneón)

"Songs of elegance and raw energy" The Independent

For sheer romance and excitement, nothing compares to the thrill of tango.

Café de los Maestros is the best of the best, and the best of a golden age.

Hailed as an Argentine version of Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club, producer Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and Oscar-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla (Brokeback Mountain, Babel) assembled a galaxy of stars from tango's golden age and top tango musicians to capture the music on film, CD (2006 Latin Grammy Award winner), and now in this fabulous live concert.

This specially formed Buenos Aires orquesta típica brings back the magic and melody of the 1940s and 1950s, before the time of Astor Piazzolla, sung and played by some of the greatest artists of the time.

Embracing the music's many moods, from the sensual swooning of the ballroom to impassioned milonga, this concert will stir emotions you may have thought you never had!

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The Golden Age of Tango: Café de los Maestros
by Peter Culshaw

The tango is still very much alive in Buenos Aires – with milongas (tango gatherings) held on every night of the week, but it is generally agreed that the golden age of tango was in the late 1940s and 1950s, when many of the tango artists assembled for the Café de los Maestros show were performing and became legends. After that, the advent of rock music put tango on the decline, although in recent years interest has once more sparked in this most passionate of music forms.

The idea of assembling such a glittering range of musicians came to Argentinian composer and musician Gustavo Santaolalla in 2004. Since then he has co-ordinated the release of a critically acclaimed double album, which recaptured the sound of a lost age, followed by a stirring documentary film and a series of concerts that have been rapturously received in Europe.

Santaolalla's music career began in 1967, at the age of 16, when he founded Arco Iris, a pioneering band that fused rock and Latin American folk music. He has become one of the most influential and best known Argentinian musician, winning a Grammy for his production of top Mexican band Café Tacuba and Oscars for his film scores of Brokeback Mountain and Babel. He is also the driving force behind the Bajofondo Tango Club, who, along with the Gotan Project, have popularised a new type of electronic tango, which can often be heard playing in the background in fashionable boutiques and cafes throughout the world.

Café de los Maestros is, Santaolalla says, his "most ambitious project" yet. Just the logistics of assembling the group of ageing musicians is daunting. A public concert in Buenos Aires, at the beautiful Teatro Colón was a sell-out in 2006 and led to further shows in Buenos Aires, Paris and London. The singers are backed by an 18-piece orquesta típica (base orchestra) featuring a galaxy of stars, from the eloquent, swooning string section, led by violinist Fernando Suarez Paz to the characteristic, melancholic sound of the bandonéon maestro Miguel Angel Varvello, the virtuoso guitar of Anibal Arias as well as piano, bass and percussion.

He comments, "I always knew I'd do something serious with tango. This is it. Café de los Maestros is related to many things I've done in my career. Since I started making records, one of the conceptual bases of everything I have done is related to the idea of identity and knowing who you are and where you come from, and trying to express that."

The singers and musicians in the project have had a fairly fluid line-up. With the advanced age of many of the participants in their 70s to 90s, illnesses have taken their toll. One of the key members on the original recordings, pianist Carlos García died aged 92 in 2006.

Inevitably, the comparisons with the multi-million selling Cuban disc and film Buena Vista Social Club have been made, and they are not inappropriate, even if Santaolalla resists comparisons between him and Ry Cooder, who was the catalyst for the Cuban project. For the recent London shows, singer Juan Carlos Godoy cut a similar figure to Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer, a veteran whose soft, almost feminine voice on songs like La Mariposa has the requisite balance between melodrama and melancholy, drowning in the swooping strings of the backing orquesta.

Uruguay's Nina Miranda has a similar warm cabaret quality to Omara Portuondo, while the splendidly fluid Osvaldo Requena, who shines particularly in duets with violinist Fernando Suarez Paz, cannot help but reminding us of the Cuban pianist Rubén González. As Carlos García puts it, "If you hear a tango that is played well and you don't feel your chest tremble, find something else to do with your time."

The majority of the songs are old classics, many of them like La Cumparsita from 1917, stretching back to the early decades of the last century. The music is not all swooning strings and lovelorn songs, though. A few tracks, such as El Choclo, whose music is given a stripped-down instrumental arrangement with guitar and bandoneón, sound closer to the more neurotic, fractured world of modernist tango composer Astor Piazzolla.

You will have to picture the tango dancers in your mind's eye - the woman perhaps with her red dress slashed to the thigh, the man louche and dissipated in a suit, embodying the endless and sometimes deadly game of love and passion central to the music.

Most of the music was nostalgic when first performed, and it is now given a further layer by the poignancy of a conjured up lost world of grace and beauty. Many excellent musicians, such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, have attempted to copy this music, but even if they have the technique they don't have the essential mugre, the dirt which balances the sheer elegance of the music. As one tango musician told me: "Just as jazz musicians must swing, tango has to have mugre, dirtiness. [A good tango musician] has to be dirty in the soul."

Such yearning music seems out of place in a world of online social applications and reality music shows, not just from another century and country, but seemingly from another planet – as Ry Cooder said about the Buena Vistas, "We caught the tail end of a comet." Here the tango stars' compelling performances make for a memorable, precious and moving evening.

THE FIRST WORLD MUSIC CRAZE

The tango seems to have emerged in the lower-class districts and bordellos of Buenos Aires in the 1890s. Despite its lowly origins, it had spread to Paris and New York by the 1910s and rapidly became Argentina's national dance. The world's ballrooms were swinging to a passionate new beat. Some of the songs performed by Café de los Maestros, like El Choclo, were written over a century ago in 1903.

The word "tango" is reputed to derive from the African Bantu word (there are several towns in Africa called Tango). The music developed from an intoxicating brew of African rhythms, indigenous Indian elements and European dance music such as the mazurka, polka and waltz. It is more European and less African-influenced than other Latin music such as Brazilian samba. The dance is supposed to have originated from the knife fights of Italian immigrants.

Peter Culshaw writes about music for numerous publications including The Daily Telegraph and theartsdesk.com. His book Clandestino: In Search of Manu Chao is published by Serpent's Tail in 2010.