This is a very light (although quite challenging!) tango fantasy in D minor for solo piano, that was written in July 2020 as a present for my Dad’s 60th birthday. It depicts, in an unapologetically programmatic manner, a Formula 1 Grand Prix with many of its features and all the excitement and drama surrounding it. The tango idiom is naturally at the forefront (heavily modelled on those of Astor Piazzola), and I found it very easy to connect the driving syncopated rhythms and melodies with the sounds of motor-racing.

After an introduction to setup the race at the start-line, the race proper begins with a fast tango, the main motif being a short cell of three notes rising in stepwise motion, and this provides the vast majority of musical material, mostly in its guise as a set of three fast quavers that syncopate and then rise in sequence, to imitate the sounds of gears changing to ever-faster modes. The tension and energy is also heightened by frequent and sudden shifts through different keys (all twelve tonal realms feature at some point in the piece!), there is a short reflective lull to allow for a pit-stop(!), and the climax sees a crash, before the chequered flag is reached, and the music moves to D major for the winners’ podium. There are paraphrases from the Italian national anthem (presumably because Ferrari won it yet again!), and a sprinkling of champagne with a quotation from Bizet’s Carmen Prelude to finish it off. Oh, and just to add to the mad rostrum of references, the three chords to represent the lights that countdown to the race were loosely inspired by those in the video game Mario Kart…!

While I am certainly very pleased with the achievements I made in this work (particularly the harmonic development and some of the heroic aspects – I was listening to a lot of Beethoven at this time!), I think it is safe to say that Auto-tango was in no way meant to be taken any more seriously than as the gift it was originally conceived as!

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