Misia & Peter – tango blog

Musicality – Edgardo Donato’s La melodía del corazón

Edgardo Donato’s music is special for me because of its upbeat, joyful rhythm — similar to D’Arienzo’s, but less driving, less insistent. As a dancer, I feel like his songs are inviting me to dance rather than insisting or driving me to the dance floor with an incessant beat. As a soloist, Donato also took the spotlight quite frequently with his violin, making his orchestra’s recordings more lyrical and melodic than most other Golden Age performers. In La melodía del corazón, he has a quite lengthy solo starting at around 35 seconds into the song.

In milongas in Europe, one can see quite a bit of energy and sometimes even acrobatics on the dance floor, but less of the simple pausing and dancing to different instruments within the same song that can be observed in milongas in Buenos Aires. It is these qualities that can give a milonga its flow and special energy, so I was very happy to find several videos of Sebastian and Mariana performing to La melodía del corazón. As far as I can tell, these are not choreographies, rather, the dancers know the music very intimately and improvise each dance in a way that expresses the qualities of the various parts of this song.

Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes -- Dublin performance:

Watch how the quality of their movement changes two minutes into the video, when the violin solo part starts — it’s almost like slow motion, but watch Sebastian’s left feet for just a second at 2:13.

Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes -- performance at La Viruta:

Here, the violin part starts at 53 seconds — again, note the flowing, soft movement they switch to immediately. At 1:07, they take a few quick, playful, rhythmical steps, then immediately return to the previous quality, slowly transitioning back to more complicated, faster movement over the next 15-20 seconds.

Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes -- Sitges performance:

Unfortunately, the first few seconds of the song are cut off, but you know what to look for. The changes are obvious at 0:27 and at 0:41. Here, instead of a gradual transition into more energetic dancing, they preserve the flowing quality until the end of the violin solo.

Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes -- Moscow performance:

One more beautiful interpretation of the same song. Again, note how the changes in the quality of their dancing follow the changes in the music.

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