Dino Saluzzi, Anja Lechner, The Metropole Orchestra, Jules Buckley

El Encuentro sets the bandoneon of Dino Saluzzi against a string orchestra in four long works of his own. It was recorded live in Amsterdam and issued in May 2010, in time for his 75th birthday. A Saluzzi piece can move from the serious to the popular, from folk memory to experiment, within a few bars. For a bandoneonist who prefers to call his music "simply an expression of innocence", such style divisions barely exist. It is his first live album.

Saluzzi was born in 1935 in Campo Santo, in northern Argentina, and learned the bandoneon from his father, a plantation worker who played the instrument. Here he is joined by the German cellist Anja Lechner, his duo partner on Ojos Negros (2007), and on one piece by his brother Felix Saluzzi on tenor saxophone. The strings of the Metropole Orchestra, some two dozen players, are conducted by Jules Buckley. The concert took place on 13 February 2009 at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ and was produced by NPS Radio in collaboration with ECM.

Vals de los días opens the programme with a waltz whose moods keep shifting, and the bandoneon and cello stay closely bound throughout. Plegaria Andina, the piece with saxophone, revisits material from Saluzzi's 1988 solo album Andina on a much larger canvas. The title work is the longest and darkest of the four, at almost 22 minutes. It leads into Miserere, for bandoneon and strings alone, a piece Saluzzi had earlier recorded with the Rosamunde Quartett on Kultrum (1998).

In The Guardian, John Fordham heard bandoneon and cello folding "sensuously into one another" on a primarily classical venture. For him the strings flesh out Saluzzi's "love-and-loss lyricism, wistful waltzes and rugged atmospherics". Duncan Heining in Jazzwise set the record beside the work of Astor Piazzolla and found the difference instructive. He called it "magnificently atmospheric", with its strength in the architecture of the writing. Not every critic agreed: Richard Elliott of PopMatters (2010) felt the bandoneon became a small voice within the collective and preferred the smaller settings of Ojos Negros and Kultrum.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2155, first released on 14 May 2010.