Today we give the floor to Eszter Vörös, one of the rare Hungarian bandeonists who shares with us the love of tango and the quest for musical excellence.
How would you define yourself in relation to the activities you carry out?
In general, I would say that I am a videographer and a musician. But in fact, sometimes it’s quite the opposite. I am first a musician and secondly a videographer. It depends on what project I'm working on.
Do you see a logical link in these two activities?
Yes, quite. When I edit a video, should it be 1 minute or 3 or 10 minutes long, or even a feature documentary, music plays an essential role in them. The documentary I made about Gabriel García Márquez, The Great Parranda, which is streamed on Netflix on the American continent and Spain, has also a special musical approach to this great writer’s life and personality. There have been other documentaries about his life but never from a musical point of view. Although he loved tango, the movie focuses on a Caribbean music style, the vallenato. Music and visuality usually goes hand in hand in my works.
What is your background?
I have a degree in economics, but I have never used this discipline to make a career out of it. I worked three times in the marketing field in Budapest, but it didn't interest me.
I went to an elementary school specialized on music from the age of six until I was 14. Education there brought me a lot as it was very efficient. I learned the piano for 10 years but not having had the opportunity to practice much during my university years I stopped learning it. It was always my dream to become a musician but at that moment I put it aside. It was much later that it came to fruition.
Music has always accompanied me, not only as a performer but also in the context of radio broadcasts or journalistic articles which have been published in prestigious magazines in Hungary (Müpa Magazin, Gramofon, Fidelio). I used to write and talk about mainly jazz music which has always been my favourite genre since I was a teenager. I worked even as a music critic, which I no longer do today, knowing how difficult and unpredictable it is to put on a musical performance in front of an audience.
Music was always there but I was ultimately too shy to pursue this artistic dream.
How did you discover Tango?
In 1999 I saw the film Tango by Carlos Saura. I was fascinated by the music and the dance. I started dancing tango first. Then the music at the milongas together with the music of Astor Piazzolla put me on a path that lead me years later to the bandoneon and to performing tango music.
Knowing that you learned the piano for more than ten years, why then turned to the bandoneon, which is little or not taught in Hungary?
There was no doubt that I wanted to play tango. I could have chosen to play it on the piano but the essence of that music for me was the sound of the bandoneon.
At that time no education was offered in Hungary. So, I started with the accordion. I liked it even though I knew that the sound of the bandoneon was different and that was what I ultimately wanted to hear.
I remember one day in Paris I was walking in the Latin Quarter and thinking about this dream of mine playing the bandoneon. This was around 2005. I sat on the stairs of a church, looked up at the blue sky and said out loud (in Hungarian) that I wanted to be the first Hungarian bandoneon player!
Luckily I heard about two guys at the Hungarian tango community, Tamás Radnai and Áron Ecsedy, who bought bandoneons on eBay and founded a local tango band (which also spoiled my wish of being the first, but I didn’t mind it at all). Áron later decided not to continue playing it and so he lent it to me on the condition that I join the amateur tango group of Tamás. It was an offer that I couldn’t refuse! I not only had a 90-year-old bandoneon but gained friends immediately and remained in the band for many years.
6 months later I bought that particular instrument.
With the leadership of Tamás, we played with Orquesta Típica Budapest in different milongas, in Hungarian tango shows mainly at the National Dance Theater and we were invited to several European Tango festivals, which was great. We both learned to play the instrument by ourselves by watching and listening to tango recordings. But I realized that even if I played this instrument well enough to play at milongas, I lacked a lot of fundamental notions to evolve. So, I made the decision to look for a teacher.
I found Julian Hasse in Buenos Aires and joined his online tango course for a year. At that time it was quite unusual to learn from such a long distance from someone I had never met. Later, in 2010 I went to Buenos Aires to meet him and to immerse in the tango music world of the porteños.
But eventually the turning point in my studies was in 2014, when I was invited to participate in a symphony concert in Eger where I played as a soloist. It was challenging at my level of that time but I succeeded it. At the end of the concert, the Argentine Ambassador who was attending the performance offered me that he would put me in touch with one of his friends, the acclaimed bandoneon player, Victor Villena, who lived in Provence, France. Luckily, Victor was about to organize a big tango music workshop in Provence and invited me there. It was a real pleasure to meet him and other bandoneonists and to belong to such a community.
I also took a private lesson with Victor who surprised me immediately as he said that I was one of the two persons in his life whom he had to reject to teach. It turned out that my bandoneon was not good enough for professional studies and it would have been useless to take classes as I could not have been able to follow his instructions. So he promised me to help buying a new instrument, which miraculously happened later in 6 months with the generous support of my father and Victor’s enormous help. I bought my first professional bandoneon in Buenos Aires from Oscar Fischer, who is one of the few bandoneon-makers there. He custome-made it to my own hands. A year later I changed it to another Fischer instrument and recently I found a wonderful Doble A, a very special Alfred Arnold bandoneon.
And since then Victor has become my teacher and my master. I had to start learning the bandoneon from scratch as he found a lot of bad habits in my playing (posture, the way I used my hands, etc).
I have attended several bandoneon workshops with him during the last 9 years and also participated in the education offered by a new world music school in Aubagne, the Institut International des Musiques du Monde (IIMM), in the south of France also at the courses of Victor Villena. After Covid, IIMM implemented online education so every two weeks we had a class and an exam at the end of each semester. I haven’t finished this diploma program yet, but I would love to do it in the next years and get a certificate by a French institution.
I also studied with the great Omar Massa and went to several tango orchestra workshops in Europe. In fact, I am preparing for another one now.
I feel lucky and grateful, because even after a few years of playing I was invited by wonderful musicians and bands to play with. My first unforgettable experience was with the Italian group, Ensemble Hyperion. At first, they invited me to play as a second bandoneonist at a tango festival in North Tuscany. I played three tangos with them and had an incredible time. Later I joined them in a tour in Switzerland where we had a concert and a milonga and recorded a CD as well.
In Hungary I was invited by a quartet that was formed by the members of the Budapest Festival Orchestra (BFO), one of the world’s best symphony orchestras. Because of our many concerts and success together, Iván Fischer invited us to play at the Heroes’ Square in front of 6000 people in 2016. This year (2023) I was asked to put together a tango orchestra and performance for the BFO’s Foundraising Ball, which is a prestigious event ever year. There we also had the honor to play with the excellent opera singer, Luciana Mancini, who often performs with the BFO. A few months later, on her recommendation I was invited with my pianist friend Éva Gárdos to perform with Luciana in Vienna, at the MusikTheare an der Wien, the second opera house of the Austrian capital. Needless to say, it was an incredible evening. I also played with the world famous opera singer, Erwin Schrott here, in his concert in Budapest.
One of the most exciting musical cooperation was and fortunately still is with János Másik, who is a composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, well, a real artist. And he plays the bandoneon as well. I not only play rock music with him, but he composed a concerto for bandoneon and string orchestra (Fantasies for Bandoneon and Strings) that I first performed with the Budapest Strings Chamber Orchestra. And he keeps on composing pieces to bandoneon together with other instruments and performing them with me.
I have also had my own tango ensembles. I few years ago I created a quintet, which today is called Puerto Tango, and that became rather a creative workshop in which there are several musicians in different line-ups. In a concert there are quintet pieces of Astor Piazzolla, and there are quartet, trio and duo performances. Mainly tango, traditional and contemporary compositions.
For me the bandoneon repertoire is very extensive and goes well beyond that of tango where it is often confined. This is why I am lucky to be able to work with artists like János Másik. You can do incredible things with this instrument that, for example, you cannot do with the piano, my other instrument. We share this state of mind with my teacher as well, who also appreciates contemporary music, jazz, and artistic experimentation.
How do you position yourself in relation to electronic music, the arrival of the computer and the synthesizer in the wake of tango nuevo post Piazzolla?
I am open to everything that is good music. In tango, particularly, I find that the “electronic revolution”, started by Gotan Project, was a great opportunity to make this genre known to more people, but at the same time its rhythm simplified the incredibly exciting percussive way tango is played. As there are no percussionists in tango, each instrument has to be played with a specific technique that makes the orchestra sound as if there was percussion in it.
And why not in this case also work with more contemporary dance companies. I was thinking, for example, of Catherine Barbesou's company which you may have heard of, and which is based in Marseille?
I don't know this company. On the one hand I love working with tango dancers who understand tango music and beautifully follow the traditions, on the other I am also open to work with contemporary dancers who approach this music from a totally different direction, using tango as an inspiration.
Usually in our concerts there are no tango dancers as I want to give the opportunity to the audience to concentrate on the music. It is a kind of mission for me to show the Hungarian audience that tango music by itself is just as interesting as the dance. At the same time I enjoy working with dancers but in that case the purpose of a performance is to show the embrace of the music and the dance.
And finally, you also dance tango. What makes you love dancing on this music? Is it a sad thought that is danced?
I think it is more melancholy than sadness. But also passion and joy. It depends on so many things what we feel when we dance tango. When I watch couples dancing, I don't see sadness on their faces. I see flow, depth, joy, melancholy, perhaps. I also dance salsa which is definitely a happier music and dance, but I can also cry on Hector Lavoe’s songs, so it is definitely not that simple to explain.
I don’t dance much anymore – partly because I spend that time with music and other things and also because I had a lot of disappointments of not having been invited to dance and I lost my courage to continue going to milongas. So I have been out of practice.
I don’t remember who said, “Buenos Aires is the wife of tango, Paris is its lover and Medellín its sister”. You made your film about García Márquez in Colombia. Have you thought about making a documentary in tango there?
I haven’t thought of it yet, but I find it a great idea! I also have an idea of making a documentary about tango in Europe. But as it would be a very large and expensive project, I haven’t made any steps towards its implementation yet. Time will tell whether this should be done or not.
-XXX-
If you want to listen to Eszter's music and her band "PuertoTango" feel free to click on her link and access to her youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFiiKoYNkhvCdDXpr4M_N2g
An another collaboration with the famous Hungarian musician János Másik : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci3IIDqvP0g
Photo Credit : Viktória Gubó