“El Encuentro” follows bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi and cellist Anja Lechner to locations in Argentina, Germany, Armenia, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland. “Your perception of music and your way of playing music change when you travel,” says Anja Lechner. The camera joins the journey and underlines the point, illuminating the processes of music making in very different contexts.
With Astor Piazzolla's recent death, Dino Saluzzi inherits the mantle of tango supremacy. This '91 release has him playing with his brothers Celso (who also plays the bandoneon), Jose (a drummer and percussionist), and Felix (a saxophonist), plus vocalists, guitarists, and another percussionist. The music mixes tango with elements of Bolivian and Uruguayan music. There are some beautiful sections, and some uneven ones as well.
In 1962, Capitol Records, Dean Martin's former record label, and Reprise Records, his new one, were engaged in battle as the former issued his final recordings for it and the latter put out just-recorded material. (The skirmish was a sideshow to the larger war between the two companies over Frank Sinatra, who had founded Reprise even before completing his Capitol contract.) In the LP racks, Capitol struck first with Dino! Italian Love Songs in February, and the album became the singer's first to figure in the best-seller charts. Reprise followed with French Style in April. Cha-Cha De Amor, the last album Martin recorded for Capitol, appeared in early November, and three weeks later Reprise responded with Dino Latino…
Dino Saluzzi’s new music for orchestra and soloists characteristically glides through the borders between the idioms. A Saluzzi composition can, from one minute to the next, be “serious”, “popular”, “traditional”, “experimental, even if these style divisions barely exist for a bandoneonist who prefers to see his work as “simply an expression of innocence”. “El Encuentro” was recorded live in Amsterdam with the Metropole Orchestra in February 2009 and is issued in time for Dino’s 75th birthday in May.