Whether the economy is booming or in a slump, musicians are desperate to lure untapped audiences into their ticket lines and complementing musical performance with an attractive visual component is always a plus. Just this week in New York, one of the more enterprising opera companies staged a Haydn opera in a planetarium, and, locally, ensembles as diverse as Art of Élan (contemporary music) and the Pacific Camerata (Renaissance music) have chosen the San Diego Museum of Art’s Hibben Gallery to be able to perform surrounded by richly hued Renaissance and Baroque paintings.

Camarada, another San Diego chamber ensemble, has played in trendy art galleries and offered wine tasting as an additional incentive to sample the group’s musical libations. Another of Camarada’s successful innovations involves four tango dancers and four instrumentalists in a celebration of the music of Astor Piazzolla, the late Argentine tango master.

Friday (January 22) in the Great Hall of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, Camarada staged “Tango Nuevo” to an unusually attentive full house. At its best, the combination of dance movement and Piazzolla’s music illuminated the shape of the music in revealing ways of which “Café 1930” proved the perfect example.

An homage to the tango that emerged in Europe between the World Wars, a more refined and less-assertive style of dance, “Café 1930” can sound a little bland played on its own. Yet with the two dance couples—Marizabel Arango/Todd Martin and Judy Solecki/Mike Markov—creating a flirtatious scene in a café, the piece took on a saucy wit, aided by Beth Ross-Buckley’s sensuous flute line and guitarist Fred Benedetti’s articulate figurations.

Abstraction worked equally well, as in “Tanti Anni,” a sleek, angular solo by Arango and Martin to violinist David Ross-Buckley’s melancholy cantilena and Benedetti’s deft chords. Arango’s poise and facial concentration, especially suspended in mid-air, suggested greater emotional depth than the typical, eroticized tango maneuvers packaged for traveling shows.

Accordionist Lou Fanucchi offered a pair of virtuoso solos that captured well the flavor of Piazzolla, inasmuch as the bandoneón, an Argentine version of the accordion, was Piazzolla’s instrument. The toccata-like flourishes in “Sens Unique” and “Invierno Porteño” revealed Fanucchi’s solid technique, but more impressive was the fluidity and finesse he lavished on the slower, aria-like sections.

In their ensemble works, such as the “Michelangelo 70” that opened the concert, the four instruments forged an appropriately dense texture with the edge that makes Piazzolla’s tango nuevo so appealing, although the guitar required some modest amplification to balance the other three.

Two pieces not by Piazzolla offered contrast, a contemporary tango by the American composer David Chesky arranged from his recent Flute Concerto and an earlier tango “Por una cabeza” by Carlos Gardel, the early 20th-century tango vocalist (and movie star!) who introduced Piazzolla to the tango repertory. Gardel’s sweeter style demonstrated what Piazzolla was reacting against (thus his term tango nuevo), and Chesky’s more fragmented melodic diffusions proved that tango can be reinvented with sufficient imagination.

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