Histoire Du Tango

By Astor Piazzolla

The piano adaptation is well done

This is my first experience with this composer and arrangement. Its a beautiful song and the perfect challenge for me.

My wife and I are a professional flute and piano duo, and we were eager to add this piece to our repertoire when we saw that it now existed in this transcription. What is critical to know about this piece is the transcription was done by Dimitriy Varelas, a flutist...

and composer who clearly has a great love of Piazzolla. While in this piece, Mr. Varelas makes many interesting and successful choices in re-creating the guitar part on the piano, he unfortunately inserts many of his own musical inventions--counter-melodies, altered harmonies, etc., resulting in a "grand concert paraphrase". While the piano part gets the majority of this treatment, the flute part is altered as well, The result is that the performer's artistic freedom is very limited, and Piazzolla's voice is obscured. I do think you can play convincingly from this music, it's a different piece;for my own playing, I'm comparing to the original flute/guitar version, and taking my pencil to cross out lots of extra notes.

This transcription of a piece originally for flute and guitar add a great deal of material in the piano part that make the piece harder than necessary to play while not accurately reflecting the original.