Friday, June 15, 2012

Tanda (vals): Pugliese with Chanel

I love the music of Osvaldo Pugliese, especially the tracks he did in the 40s together with the singer Roberto Chanel. Unfortunately, my collection contains only two waltzes with them. To be sure I am not missing tracks, I checked with a query at tango.info. It turns out that those two waltzes are the only ones available, forcing me to mix in other artists to create a set of three waltzes for a tanda.

Browsing my current collection, I filtered the waltzes on the same year as the Pugliese/Chanel ones, the year 1944. This led me to the waltz Temblando by Laurenz/Bermúdez, which I felt completed the tanda.

TitleOrchestraSingerYearBPM
Puentecito de mi ríoOsvaldo PuglieseRoberto Chanel194465
TemblandoPedro LaurenzCarlos Bermúdez194463
Tu casa ya no estáOsvaldo PuglieseRoberto Chanel194462

Here you can listen to the tanda on Spotify:


Not knowing Spanish, I can only guess the content of the songs using Google translate. This crude translation does only help me in remembering the songs, not in appreciating them.

The first song, Puentecito de mi río, is about an old stone bridge, and I imagine the light piano playing in the beginning is the water bubbling in the river beneath. The bridge enables the singer to get to some beautiful place. Later in the song, the bridge is destroyed, and the singer has to overcome the river to enable his songs to cross.

The second song, Temblando, tells a story of a man meeting a beautiful, young girl when he stays at her ranch. The title translated to "trembling", and that is all he is able to do. Instead of talking to her, he rides away at full speed, bearing with him only the memories and emotions of the encounter.

In the last song, the singer is telling someone that the home of their youth is no longer. The song seems to use quite poetic sentences, because Google translate is not making much sense on this one. Anyway, the title translates to something like "Your home is no more".

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