TangoMundo is a performance project begun in 2001 in Buenos Aires by Argentine writer/musician Guillermo Anad (Music Director, violin, viola) and Australian cabaret veteran Faye Bendrups (spoken word, piano, voice).
TangoMundo has produced concerts, music-theatre shows, scholarly research, popular press articles, lecture-demonstrations, taught scores of students the history and sociology of the Argentine Tango, and entertained hundreds of listeners at music venues and festivals.
They have been joined at various times by other leading Australian and international musicians and performers. Now, acclaimed accordionist and jazz master Anthony Schulz joins to make an unforgettable trio.
All TangoMundo repertoire is arranged by Guillermo Anad, who is an Académico Correspondiente for the Argentine National Academy of Tango and a specialist in the life and music of Astor Piazzolla. TangoMundo play an extensive range of his compositions, many rarely heard.
Piazzolla’s music flourished in one of the greatest urban centres of the 20th century: Buenos Aires. This is music that rises from the turmoil of the metropolis, crossing paths with classical music forms and reinvented street tango. His music evokes both dingy cabarets and classy concert halls, mixed up in the rhythms of the city in the run-down barrios where poets and musicians rule.
This is Piazzolla and TangoMundo: sounds of the city, sounds of people, passion, power, despair, drama, romance, regret; traversing Bach fugal influences, improvisation, Latin jazz, and the re-invention of the tango form.
TangoMundo’s latest CD Piazzolla Unleashed: Reclaiming the Edge is available on Bandcamp: https://tangomundo.bandcamp.com/album/piazzolla-unleashed-reclaiming-the-edge.
“The great achievement of TangoMundo is to mix classical and popular nuances of my father’s music using an unexpected combination of only three instruments: viola, accordion and piano. This is a novel and entirely Piazzollean approach.”
Performances
Guillermo Anad
Music director, arranger, viola
Guillermo Anad is an Argentine musician, writer and composer who has published widely on the Tango. He is Académico Correspondiente for the National Academy of Tango, Buenos Aires. He produced the radio show La vuelta al tango en ochenta mundos for Radio Nacional, Argentina and is a specialist in the life and music of Astor Piazzolla. He studied with Szymsia Bajour (the first violinist to record with Astor Piazzolla's quintet) and performed with the Antonio Agri Ensemble (violinist with Piazzolla's ensembles). He played with Edelmiro 'Toto' D'Amario (bandoneonist in the Alfredo Gobbi and Horacio Salgán orchestras), Ciro Pérez, Gustavo Beytelmann and the contemporary tango band La Chicana, among others. His original compositions have been performed throughout Latin America and Europe and recorded in the USA. For TangoMundo's performance repertoire, he has arranged 100 tangos, milongas, tango songs, and favourites from the classical canon (Bach, Debussy, Gershwin, Grieg, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Satie, Villa-Lobos et al).
Faye Bendrups
Piano and voice
Faye Bendrups is a musician, composer and performance-maker. She inaugurated an interdisciplinary tango project in Argentina: Takes Who To Tango, which has also presented seminars and performances in Barcelona, London, Basel, Sydney and Melbourne. She wrote and composed the opera Sindromtango: una ópera grotesca, the music theatre works Perpetual Tango and Shades of Tango, and the song cycles Cancionero Neruda and Cancionero América Latina. In Australia, she produced cabaret works with Black Market for more than 20 years, and in Argentina performed at Bar Sur and Teatrobar Bukowski. Her original works have been commissioned by the Melbourne Theatre Company, Playbox Theatre and Queensland Theatre Company, among others.
Anthony Schulz
Accordion
Anthony Schulz is a Vancouver-based performer, improviser, composer, and educator who first established himself as a leading voice in Australian contemporary music. His work strives to dispel preconceptions of the piano accordion, using a lens of seemingly disparate musical forms to explore the instrument as a vehicle for profound nuance and complexity.
Anthony’s sound world is a rich tapestry informed by diverse, high-level collaborations, including the ARIA award-winning ensemble Zulya and the Children of the Underground, the chamber-focused Bach Project with cellest Rachel Scott, the trio Ball Hanlon Schulz, and the French Musette ensemble Langue de Chat. Whether on stage, in the studio, or mentoring the next generation of players through bespoke workshops and private tuition, Anthony remains dedicated to the ongoing exploration and presentation of the accordion's limitless potential.