Arranger of various formations, pianist, conductor and composercollaborator of great personalities, and in a wide range that goes from Plácido Domingo to Teresa Parodi, Argentina Nazareno Andorno he is famous in the musical environment of the United States, a country where he has lived for years and which granted him citizenship for his artistic merits.
At the time of the conversation, Nazareno is in his place of origin, Marcos Paz (in the western suburb), where his musical adventures began at the hands of a grandmother who gave him a guitar and a family who provided him with a piano.
Today Andorno resides in Miami, but spends part of his time on planes and in airports.
“If you travel a lot, one of the problems you have is that you can’t write… That’s why I have a base everywhere, I have a notebook and I carry it with me,” he says. Recently arrived from Punta del Este, where he performed with Horacio Lavandera and premiered a song dedicated to Lucio Dupuy based on a poem by Alejandro Roemmers (let me be a child), prepares to go to Assisi, where a new musical challenge awaits him, with which he converses clarion.
A soldier from any war
-From the beginning, the work of Waldo de los Ríos marked you a lot.
Yes, it marked me a lot. As a boy, I was always interested in what an orchestra did. When I was born the piano was in fashion, Richard Clayderman or Waldo de los Ríos were famous, everything instrumental was a boom when I was born.
But the orchestra always caught my attention, because there were a lot of melodies playing on top of each other. The piano was great, but something else was missing. Waldo caught my attention for that waste of music, of genius. Over the years I realized the guy was a genius.
If you practice the piano, you will eventually play one, but not the other. You can reduce Beethoven’s work to four notes, and even a seven or eight year old can play the melody with his right hand, but really the work is written in orchestration. I’m passionate about seeing how with a reason you can get to do a job of that magnitude, and let’s say that reason is the excuse.
-Perhaps even in Waldo de los Ríos you were marked by that union he managed to make (which was a bit scandalous at the time) of academic and popular.
-I then understood it over the years, because as a boy he was already what he was, and as time went by I began to look for him a little more. The strength he had to innovate or perhaps to create. He died very prematurely. He was a being from another planet. The same thing happened with Astor Piazzolla, but Waldo los Ríos was first.
After that childhood approach, and having already decided to be a musician, Nazareno passes through the classes of other local teachers until he arrives at the National Conservatory. There they advised him to explore jazz, which he began to explore with Adrian Iaies.
“Afterwards I went to see Juan Carlos Cirigliano, Jorge Navarro and those who composed orchestral music. I was looking to see how it was learned. The hardest thing to find was someone to teach you how to compose and orchestrate, and the few who did, like Lalo Schifrin and Jorge Calandrelli, lived in the United States, and the ones who stayed in Argentina were people who had methods there, but had never did nothing,” he says.
-Then?
-Then I came to the United States and met child silvetti, who was a genius, another Waldo de los Ríos, and he invited me to work with him. When I met him, I had already made many records here with more than 90 artists, at the age of 17: Alejandro Lerner, Estela Raval, Mario Clavell, Valeria Lynch…
“There were professors who would say to me, ‘Look, there’s another world there that you can explore, and now that you’re young and have no roots, you can try it.’
“I left as a programmer, copyist, arranger, like a soldier in any war. I got there and the guy had records with Luis Miguel, with Plácido Domingo… For me it was like a dream, and what he wrote was lucky enough that after three days it was played by an orchestra, which was what I was looking for: they weren’t just books”.
He continues: “I also entered the University of Miami, then went to Los Angeles, where I graduated as a big band jazz arranger. We learned a lot and the musicians who came to record were very famous. Then Bebu Silvetti passed away and I had to follow the road.
The orchestra behind the voice
-How did the meeting with Plácido go?
-The Plácido Domingo thing is incredible, because there was an engineer who worked with Bebu Silvetti, Rafa Sardina. One day I find him at home Alessandro Sanzwith whom I was working, and he asked me to record an album he was preparing with Plácido…
A few days later, I was in Argentina, I gave him a landline phone and after half an hour he said to me: “Look, they’re calling you on the phone”. I thought he was going to call me the director of a company. No: it was Placido. He proposes to make arrangements, but in four days. I said yes and when I interrupted I thought “what a mess I’ve gotten myself into”, but finally after four days the arrangements were finished.
It was a before and after in my lifeBecause Plácido Domingo somehow legitimized everything and opened other doors for me, because he is an artist recognized all over the world.
-How is the creative process of an arrangement?
-If you have a melody, a reason, take the melody and you must enrich it without damaging it. You start thinking about all the elements and all the colors of the orchestra, you think about rhythm and speed, which are very important factors, and then comes the points where you have to shine the most artistically, which are the introduction, the central part and end.
Obviously, record companies no longer want intros or endings, but that’s where you can put your knowledge. In a song with eight chords, what you can do is infinite, in every note of the melody you can put a chord or four. You can turn it into a Bach piece, you can even create a fugue.
But sometimes when they entrust you with something, if they see a cascade of harmony and something very far-fetched, they run away, and sometimes you have people who give you much more participation and allow you to be more yourself. Everything comes out of the piano. If you are clear about what the piano does in relation to the melody or in relation to what you do, the full orchestra comes from there.
Return to Patagonia
After the second album with Plácido Domingo, Nazareno Andorno entered a crisis.
“Existential angst began to grip me and I started to feel a little ashamed of popular music. I said to myself ‘but I’ve always wanted to be a composer of symphonic music’, which is basically what an orchestrator is, but you are a composer who is hidden, who is obtuse, who is always sad. And then I started hearing it I needed a change in my life and start writing my own music.
In Punta del Este it connected with Albert Romers, who advised him to meet his brother, Alexander, a writer and patron of the arts. After creating a symphonic theme for him which he completed in four days, Andorno began to embrace other projects with Roemmers, one of which can be seen today on Avenida Corrientes: Return to Patagonia, a musical work with Fer Dente, Nahuel Pennisi and Franco Masini. Today, both project an opera.
Between symphonic composer and all-round arranger, between hidden pianist and integral artist, Andorno (who cultivates a low profile) maintains a creed.
“I always say that the hardest thing is to make honest musicIt sounds good, because you can do something like Mahler or Ravel or Gershwin, extremely complex, but excellent. If it sounds good, it’s because it’s good. They are only twelve notes: you have to know what they have done with them from Beethoven to Bill Evans”.
Source: Clarin
