Alberto Ginastera 

Estancia (Four Dances From the Ballet), Op. 8a; Concerto for Harp and Orchestra, Op. 25; Overture to The Creole "Faust," Op. 9; Variaciones concertantes, Op. 23. 

Magdalena Barrera, harp;
Orquesta Ciudad de Granada, Josep Pons, cond.

Review by Joe Milicia
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  In the late 1960s the music of Argentina's leading composer, Alberto Ginastera, was rather prominent in the United States. His Piano Concerto of 1961 made quite a splash, and was recorded in 1968 by Joao Carlos Martins with Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony. The RCA liner notes called Ginastera "one of the leading creative figures in the world of contemporary music." Meanwhile, the New York City Opera had a hit with Don Rodrigo and Columbia recorded Washington Opera's production of Bomarzo. Those years may have been the heyday of academic serialism, but Ginastera's music -- though his latest works tended to be expressionistic, and like Aaron Copland's thornier, more abstract pieces, sometimes challenging to a general public--had some of the rhythmic vitality and folk flavor of the older American composer.

Nowadays, at least in the States, it seems that only the suite from his ballet Estancia is still a concert favorite, though Daniel Barenboim did program the Harp Concerto with the Chicago SO last fall, and several recordings of Ginastera's best-known orchestral works have recently appeared. Listeners unfamiliar with the composer can get considerable satisfaction from this new CD with the Civic Orchestra of Granada under Josep Pons.

Estancia (Ranch), a bold work to open with, is also the earliest in composition. It was composed for a South American tour of the American Ballet Caravan, choreographed by George Balanchine, no less, and premiered in Buenos Aires in 1943. Based upon the gaucho epic Martin Fierro, Argentina's national poem, the complete ballet features a baritone who both sings and recites, but only the four-movement suite is well known, at least outside Argentina. The scenario, in which a city boy wins a peasant girl by demonstrating his ranching skills, suggests that Estancia inhabits the same universe as the exactly contemporaneous Rodeo and Appalachian Spring. (Has the stage work ever been revived?) Pons' performance of the suite demonstrates both strengths and weaknesses. The slow second movement is played with delicacy and a pleasing languidity, rising to a still-serene climax midway through. But the other three movements, with their aggressive rhythmic drive, lack a degree of intensity. The famous "malango" finale doesn't dazzle and overwhelm as it might in the hands of a great virtuoso orchestra.

The Overture to The Creole "Faust" (really a short tone poem), which premiered in 1944, is also based on a poem about gauchos -- in this case, a cowboy sees a performance of Gounod's Faust and tries to recount it in his own terms to a farmer. The music embeds familiar themes from the opera ("hides" might be a better term for some of us) in sections by turns abstract and imbued with Argentine folk rhythms, but with seemingly little of the playful humor of the source material. Howard Hanson once recorded the piece with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, with rhythmic verve but a thickness of sound (at least on the Mercury Golden Import LP reissue) that makes the transparency of the orchestral sound on the Harmonia Mundi CD most refreshing. Pons evidently considers this to be a piece about chords -- he brings out the strange sequences of suspended chords that would later become a trademark of Ginastera's style, and makes the work sound like a more interesting and original piece than Hanson does. Still, the music has a halting and inconsequential quality, unlike the rest of the music on the CD.

The Variaciones concertantes of 1953 (premiere led by Igor Markevitch) is a concerto for orchestra in the form of a set of variations -- in other words, the form of Benjamin Britten's Variations on a Theme of Purcell (AKA the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra). But where Britten's piece is one of glittering wit, Ginastera's is suffused with what might be called romantic melancholy, though there are scherzo-like sections for flute, then clarinet, and later a brief trumpet-trombone duo that leads to a showy variation for violin, plus a Latin-flavored rondo-finale. It may seem unfair to compare Pons' orchestra to the BSO with its glorious first chairs as of 1968, when RCA paired the Variaciones with the Piano Concerto -- and indeed, on the new recording the cello and harp duet that states the theme pales in the light of Jules Eskin's and Bernard Zighera's impassioned playing. But the rest of the performance truly holds its own. Pons sustains the several slow variations beautifully, with clarity and touching melancholy (the performance is two minutes longer than Leinsdorf's, by the way), and the rousing finale has all the vigor one could want.

Finally, we have the Harp Concerto, written for Nicanor Zabaleta in 1956 but not premiered until 1965, with Zabaleta and Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia; Zabaleta recorded a revised 1968 version for DG with Jean Martinon and the Orchestre ORTF, which is more than ripe for a CD reissue. It's in the traditional three movements (fast-slow-fast), but constantly fresh, with brilliant orchestration, including plenty of percussion. Again Harmonia Mundi provides a very reasonable alternative to the premiere recording. Magdalena Barrera's harp doesn't quite have the warmth of sound of Zabaleta's (nor is it as foregrounded against the orchestra as his), but she plays the long cadenza that opens the finale with great authority and flair. Neither orchestra is simply better than the other: each recording brings different prominence to certain instruments or rhythms in a given passage, though overall the CD has greater presence and dynamic range.

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