Adolfo Carabelli

Historical background

Adolfo Carabelli's orchestra never played in public: it was a studio band, born within the orbit of the Victor label. In his Historia de la orquesta típica, Sierra credits Carabelli, the label's artistic director, with the initiative of replacing the ensemble then in place with an orquesta típica formed exclusively for recording work: so was born the Orquesta Típica Victor, which began its activity in November 1925 and would leave more than three hundred recordings. The orchestra's musical direction went first to the bandoneonist Luis Petrucelli, whom Benedetti names as its initial director. When Petrucelli left for the United States in 1926 to play bandoneon for Canaro, Victor replaced him with Carabelli, Michael Lavocah reports. Carabelli formed his own orchestra at the same time, one that likewise existed only for the record, and which played, Lavocah notes, jazz and tango, in that order. The two line-ups shared their musicians.

Under Carabelli's direction the Orquesta Típica Victor recorded prolifically under its own name, while Ciriaco Ortiz cut thirty-four titles for the same label as Orquesta Típica Los Provincianos, mostly between 1931 and 1934. Lavocah, comparing them with the Orquesta Típica Victor's recordings of the same years, judges those of Los Provincianos often the more musically accomplished, and supposes that Ortiz pushed Carabelli to raise his game; he cites the daring arrangement of El distinguido ciudadano, cut in 1932, where Ortiz places a long unaccompanied bandoneon variation very early on. The kinship of these house orchestras is such that publishers themselves have confused them: on an RCA Victor 100 Años disc devoted to the Típica Victor, BMG printed Carabelli's Rodríguez Peña by mistake.

Source: Sierra, Historia de la orquesta típica, 1966; Michael Lavocah, Tango Stories: Musical Secrets, chapter 21 "OTV and the house orchestras: Orquesta Tipica Sony, anyone?"; Benedetti, Nueva historia del tango : de los orígenes al siglo XXI, 2015.