USA (By Bernard Holland, NYTimes) March 3, 2004 - The tango is sublimated warfare. It rarely smiles. Elegance, ritual and a deep dignity win out over darker impulses. In a single Argentine dance form the universal paradoxes of romance between two human beings seem to gather.

Tenderness and physical passion are mutual between the dancers, but the tango is a line of separation not crossed by either. There are, in the sideways short marches, twirls and intertwined limbs, invitation and rejection, suspicion and submission, confrontation and avoidance. The tango dictates that men lead and women follow. But true to life's war of the sexes, dominance has a way of looking one way but being another.

In Santa Barbara tango lessons at an outdoor shopping mall enthralled throngs of upscale teenagers and preteens. As boyfriends shuffled awkwardly, girls midway between childhood and the bellybutton ring assimilated up-to-date dance floor shimmies with the prescribed steps of a style from the late 19th century.

Just as the Viennese waltz and the Dixieland jazz band were once notorious in their societies, so the tango began as synonymous with disrepute. (It is interesting to note, to the contrary, that the czardas, a careering Hungarian dance, began in upper class ballrooms and drifted down to the lower orders.) The malambo is a rougher, more vehement gaucho dance: much foot-stomping, meant for men only.

The movement of the tango — originally two beats to a measure, the first divided, and later 4/4 or 4/8 time — is seductive. So, too, are the harmonic progressions and repetitive song-form stanzas. Both elements enter a vastly broader and more complex world in the music of Astor Piazzolla, certainly the Michelangelo of tango music. But surrounding, indeed enveloping, is the dark beauty of the dance itself.

Although the tango comes from Argentina, a French fascination with it a century ago started a worldwide phenomenon. The stolid Finns have made it a national pastime. In 1913 Selfridges, the London department store, sponsored a tango festival. More recently Gidon Kremer, the Latvian violinist, has devoted good parts of entire seasons to Piazzolla's music. Origins of the name are arguable. The Cuban habanera and Andalusian flamenco are close cousins. Some say that "tango" is Spanish, others that it corrupts a Nigerian term for drumming.

The great American great surge of popular music in the 1920's and 30's produced Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Vernon Duke out of a cultural convergence of Eastern Europeans and black Americans. The tango came from a similar clash: lonely European immigrants confronting an unfamiliar Latin American culture. The first tangos were danced by men, women being in short supply. This was music of the barrooms and the streets, and violent crime was never far away.

Tango instruments could be a violin, a flute and a guitar, but the bandoneón, a smallish member of the accordion family played with buttons instead of a keyboard, became the signature sound. Bandoneón virtuosos are in worldwide demand. Daniel Binelli was wanted in Santa Barbara, but the Philadelphia Orchestra got him. Charles Dutoit conducted a Valentine Day's concert in Philadelphia and offered Mr. Binelli in four Piazzolla pieces along with Spanish music filtered through French and Russian composers.

With piano, added strings and sometimes batteries of bandoneones, the tango band aggressively rejects luxury of sound. The instruments confront elegance of movement with an acid and corrosive tone, much as the rawness of saxophones and the banging of drums rub against jazz's most loving moods. The clash of sight and sound is a metaphor for tango's emotional subtexts.

Falling in love brings both happiness and pain. The surrender of self is a dangerous act, and the hesitancy to submit is splendidly acted out in a well-danced tango.

The tango has changed. Originally for dancers, it began to sing with Carlos Gardel and "La Noche Triste" in 1917. Gardel, born in 1890, died in a plane crash in 1935, but his recordings and film clips have become sacred texts. Gardel hovered above two movies shown in Santa Barbara (a film festival in town happily cooperated): Carlos Saura's "Tango" (1998), subtle and deeply impressive, and the French "Exiles of Gardel" (1985), overwrought and pretentious.

Tango in postwar Argentina was suppressed by right-wing politics and overwhelmed by rock 'n' roll. A new species, tango nuevo, arrived in the hands of Piazzolla toward the end of the 1950's. Now tango was made to fit into concert halls and other music-only places. Piazzolla, who died in 1992, brought symphonic colors and ambiguous harmonies to the tango's trancelike repetitions. At the Philadelphia concert, in "Oblivion" and "Adios Nonino," melodies flowed in opposing keys, but Piazzolla's sequential phrases, laid out like a gracefully descending staircase, give the "easy listening" sound as much distinction as does the music of Messiaen.

Earlier in that concert Mr. Binelli brought florid virtuosity and high-pressure emotionalism to "Aconcagua," a concerto with string orchestra and percussion. Piazzolla, a South American reared in New York's jazz world, aspired to classical music, but Nadia Boulanger, famous as a teacher of Americans, sent him home from Paris to pursue his own music.

Good advice, especially in light of the concerto, a piece with flashes of Piazzolla magic but obscured by the huffing and puffing of classical music rhetoric. In Philadelphia it was "Milonga del Ángel" and "Oblivion" that melted the barriers of so-called high and low cultures and sang their way into listeners' hearts.

The Santa Barbara Festival's program notes evoked Gershwin and his attempts to "elevate American popular music . . . into the symphonic world." Gershwin certainly wrote concertos and an opera. In the same way, a kind of popular-culture Argentine wildness infiltrated Alberto Ginastera's "Estancia" as danced by the State Street Ballet of Santa Barbara. But was it Ginastera doing the elevating? I wonder.

The genius of Piazzolla's art, beyond its hypnotic soulfulness, is its refusal to be elevated by anyone. Piazzolla's music, at its purest, allows the tango to enter classical music places on its own terms and to present itself alongside Ravel, Chabrier and Rimsky-Korsakov, as it did in Philadelphia. It tolerates the concert hall. The tango needs no help in the elevation department.