Sunday 20 February 2011

El Huracán

Another brilliant tango tone-poem. An instrumental, no words, but you get the title - "Hurricane".

Listen to to the slowly rising wind - whipping up the sea, blowing the branches from side to side, then trees, then there's heavy rain (plucked strings), and it starts to whistle, turning and wailing, with bigger and bigger things flying around over longer and longer distances:

Alfredo de Angelis y su orquesta – El Huracán*

Notice at 02:09. There's an eye in the storm! The pause is only tiny, but the cadence before it makes you think that it's the end. And when this was played, almost everybody stopped there and started talking (not my partner - he was wise to it) - and it seems to me that after the eye, the arrangement differs so that the wind is going the other way, until it's really all over. There are several versions of El Huracán by different orchestras, but this is the only one I've heard with such a pronounced, catch-you-out eye.

Great.

*Note: You'll need Spotify, an advertising-supported music streaming service, to play this link. I gather it will  not work in the USA, but the De Angelis version of El Huracán is also available on iTunes. I don't think US'ers will be able to stream it legally from anywhere without paying, you'd have to buy and download, but I don't know.

3 comments:

Chris said...

Here's the version most often heard in milongas.

Michael Lavocah said...

El Huracán also stands for Club Atlético Huracán, a football club in the barrio of Parque Patricios in Buenos Aires. Their nickname, El Globo or El Globito, might also have you thinking of a tango by the OTV.

msHedgehog said...

@Michael, brilliant, thanks for that! :)