21 XAVIER PHILLIPS ∙ LAUSANNE SOLOISTS From the point of view of a soloist, what is your personal relationship to this work? This concerto contains everything that recurs throughout Piazzolla’s music: the implacable rhythmic drive, which we worked on at length, weighing heavily on the rhythm, that severity, that aggressiveness, that defiance of life and death; but also an intense, raw emotion. Some passages are heartrending, beautiful to the point of tears. Piazzolla is profoundly sentimental, and that never disappears beneath the violence of his expression. Behind the roughness one finds an infinite tenderness. I recognise myself in that aspect of his personality, which is why his music has always spoken to me.’To my mind this concerto is a broad, full, expansive work, gathering together everything he had already expressed in The Seasons and elsewhere. After writing for smaller formations such as the quintet, he returned to a denser writing, that of the orchestra, using counterpoint, as though to say to us: “This is where I come from.” In a sense, yes, it is a gift offered in return to Nadia Boulanger.
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