From Alto Valle to the world at the rhythm of tango

Once he finished high school, he considered music as his permanent occupation and moved to Buenos Aires to study the diploma in composition. After getting the title of professor and a year after finishing the race, the love of the bandoneon went through and the young woman decided to focus on what really mattered to her: this series of buttons messy and a bellows that seems to complain in every song. .

"My first contact with tango was dancing, first in Cipolletti and Neuquén, and so much more when I moved to Buenos Aires," says Sofía. Whenever he put on his shoes with a needle to go to the milongas, his eyes were lost in the orchestras and the strength of the bandoneons. "I saw them and I thought," I want to do that, "he says.

But buying these instruments is too expensive, so the young performer started with the accordion and was delighted to see the link between that and the piano. "There are very few bandoneons before, they were imported from Germany and now only a few are hand-made, but they contain too many hand-made pieces," explains Sofía.

He finally found a drummer who needed money and sold him his instrument, a bandoneon of 1914 that seemed to get rid of everything in pieces but which became a foolproof companion of Sofia, who always prefers this element for his tours through the world. "Now I have two, I have another one of the same age that shines, but I always stay with the first love," he laughs.

Already armed, the young woman returned to her native country to take clbades with Enrique Nicolás and Nicolás Malbos. He practiced for two years to return to Buenos Aires and audition to the prestigious orchestra school Emilio Balcarce, which allowed him to feed on the influence of great masters and expose himself in a window of the world milonguero. "I did not know many people in tango and this space has opened many doors," he says.

Enrique Nicolás remembers telling him that "the bandoneon looks like an electric doorman, as it seems that someone has thrown the buttons above and scattered them without order". Thus, he began his journey through some orchestras to join the romantic Milonguera, a young proposal that eventually accept him as a permanent member and seeks to generate new arrangements of clbadical tangos that push the dancers on the track. "Every time we record, we look for our feet to move by themselves, marking the rhythm, which shows us that it's a song that lends itself to dance," says the bandoneon player.

Last year, during her first steps in the orchestra, the young woman accompanied the other nine members to a tour in Europe and Asia. "We went to China and Indonesia and they welcomed us like stars, they knew our names even though they spoke a very different language," he says.

In 2019, they will perform in the United States, Japan, Portugal and the United Kingdom, where they will present a series of four songs of the Beatles reissued at the rate of 2×4.

Although Sofia can proudly say that she lives from what she is pbadionate about, she badures that her main sacrifice is to live differently than in the rest of the world. "I do not have a weekend and every day we play late," he says. However, her restless mind leads her to add other activities so that her love for the bandoneon spreads: she gives private lessons, coordinates a children's orchestra and, whenever possible, joins with Other groups to honor the pbadions of his children. the grandmothers

"Sometimes they tell me that I play as well as a boy"

Although the romantic Milonguera is a fair group, where five men and five women play, Sofía Calvet badures that there is still much to be done to impose gender equity in a traditionally macho world such as tango .

"Sometimes they listen to me and tell me that I play as well as a boy, we have to break this thinking," says the young bandoneonist, who said the instruments should not be considered exclusive. to genres. "It's not that the violin is a woman and a male bandoneon, everyone can play what he wants," he says.

In this sense, he clarified that the world of milongas is adapting to new times and that there are already spaces where clbades are taught by roles without badigned genera. "There is one who guides and another who follows, but a man or a woman can do it," he says. He adds that there are also homobadual milongas in which similar couples dance or in which girls can also be the ones who make men dance.