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With the album Tango Fatal, Carlos Franzetti won the 2001 Latin Grammy for Best Tango Album.
The ballet Tango Fatal represents a collaboration between Argentine composer Carlos Franzetti and San Francisco-based writer Lorenz Russo, who earlier worked together on an Eva Peron-themed opera called Corpus Evita. The version of the ballet offered on CD was conducted by Franzetti and included new tangos from his pen in addition to the music of the ballet's original 1997 production. Russo's story, set in a Buenos Aires tango bar whose existence is threatened by gangsters, concerns a woman who will be led on the dance floor only by a mysterious stranger. There are seven other characters, and they ineluctably proceed toward a violent end nicely evocative of tango's underworld origins. Of course, as with any recording of ballet music, those who listen to Tango Fatal without seeing it are missing half the experience. But Franzetti's music has much to recommend it on its own terms. It offers a variety of rhythms and textures new to tango and plainly up to the potentially difficult task of imbuing the ballet's cast of characters with distinct personalities. The work's debut recording on the Amapola label was partly recorded in New York and partly in Argentina, with only a few players in common. The difference in styles between bandoneón players Néstor Marconi (Buenos Aires) and Raul Jaurena (New York) was sharp, but helping knit things together was the presence in both studios of pianist Allison Brewster Franzetti, the composer's wife and creator of a fine disc of Piazzolla rarities. The work itself testifies to the continuing vitality of the tango craze, which continues to expand into new musical realms and here makes the only seemingly simple leap to ballet in a musically solid and satisfying way. Tango Fatal could be realized by modest forces and would be ideally suited for theatrical presentation by any ambitious tango organization.