A performance born from dance

	If you go WHAT: The Figueroa Music and Arts Project WHEN: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 20 WHERE: Robertson & Sons Violin Shop, 3201 Carlisle NE HOW MUCH: $52 in advance at www.figueroaproject.org or at the door. Includes a post-concert reception with the artists

The rhythms of the three movements of “Salon Buenos Aires” are all derived from dances – the tango, the milonga and the samba, del Aguila said.

“It’s a nostalgic piece of the good times when I was growing up in the 1960s in Montevideo,” he said. Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, is across the Rio Plata from Buenos Aires.

The work, del Aguila said, also has themes that are heard in his opera “Time and Again Barelas,” which the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and Chorus premiered in 2006 as part of the celebration of Albuquerque’s tricentennial.

Del Aguila said he wrote “Salon Buenos Aires” when he was in Albuquerque in the period leading up to the opera’s premiere.

The program also features a medley of songs by Rafael Hernandez, including “Lamento Borincano” and “Preciosa,” Pablo Ziegler’s “Suite Canyengue,” Ernesto Grenet’s “Drume Negrita” as well as music of Astor Piazzolla, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Carlos Franzetti.

“The most central composer of the whole evening is Franzetti,” said Guillermo Figueroa, the project’s artistic director. “We are playing one piece of his, ‘Little Village.’ It’s kind of a very mild samba-swing that’s absolutely ravishing.”

And Franzetti arranged several of the works on the program, Figueroa said.

He said the roots of this concert are with a group he had played with in New York City called Orquesta Nova.

The ensemble was devoted to Franzetti’s “sophisticated nouveau Hispanic music, not the old-fashioned boleros, tangos.”