José Bragato

José Bragato (born 12 October 1915) is an Italian-born Argentine cellist, composer, conductor, arranger and musical archivist who, in his early career, was principal cellist in the Colón Theatre orchestra in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Apart from his involvement in classical music he also performed for many years in a number of Ástor Piazzolla's Nuevo tango (New tango) ensembles where his cello solos, which had never before featured in tango, put him in the vanguard of Nuevo tango from its birth in the 1950s. Since then he has done numerous and varied arrangements of Piazzolla's compositions.

José Bragato was born in Udine, Italy, in 1915 into a family of musicians, the fourth child of Enrico Bragato and Erminia Castronin. His father and his father's elder brother, Giuseppe, were both flautists. He had an elder brother, Bruno, a younger brother, Enrique, and two older sisters, Vera and Dina.

In 1925 José joined the Jacopo Tomadini Conservatory in Udine, where he sang in the choir and later studied the piano; his brother, Bruno, studied the flute.

Times were hard in Italy after the First World War and in 1927 his father, Enrico, and older brother, Bruno, left for Argentina where they settled initially in Saavedra, a neighbourhood in the north of the city of Buenos Aires. José, together with his mother and the other children joined them the following year.

José continued to study the piano whilst in 1930 Bruno joined the orchestra of the Colón Theatre as a flautist and his father was playing the flute in various city orchestras. That same year the city of Buenos Aires suffered severe flooding as the River Plate overflowed its banks and the Bragato family lost everything, including José's piano.

In 1930 a colleague of Bruno in the Colón Theatre orchestra, the German cellist and teacher Ernst Peltz, began to give José free lessons on a cello which he provided for him and it was with this instrument that he entered the Manuel de Falla National Conservatory of Music. Around this time his younger brother Enrique started to learn the violin but soon abandoned it in favour of the bassoon. In 1936 the family moved to Córdoba Avenue in the centre of Buenos Aires.

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