Alberto Ginastera
The Complete Music for Piano & Piano Chamber Ensembles

*  Piano Sonata No. 1, op. 22 (1952)
*  Piano Sonata No. 2, op. 53 (1981)
*  Piano Sonata No. 3, op. 55 (1982)
*  Danzas Argentinas, op. 2 (1937)
*  Tres Piezas, op. 6 (1940)
*  Malambo, op. 7 (1940)
*  Doce Preludios Americanos, op. 12 (1944)
*  Suite de Danzas Criollas, op. 15 (1946)
*  Rondo sobre temas infantiles argentinos, op. 19 (1947)
*  Pampeana No. 1, op. 16 (1947)
*  Milonga from Dos Canciones, op. 3 (1938)
*  Tres Danzas from Estancia, op. 8 (1941)
*  Toccata by Zipoli (1970)
*  Quintet for piano & string quartet, op. 25 (1963)
*  Pampeana No. 2, op. 21 (1950)
*  Sonata for cello & piano, op. 49 (1979)

Barbara Nissman (piano), Ruben Gonzalez (violin), Laurentian String Quartet,
Aurora Natola-Ginastera (cello)
Pierian 0005/6 Total time: 74:10 + 72:34

Summary for the Busy Executive: Stunning.

Given the length of his career, Ginastera wrote very little, whether
because he worked slowly or because he periodically dried up, I can't
say.  However, like Barber, much of what he did write musicians - often
very good musicians - have taken up, and he even has classical hits with
the classical-music public.  The piano music, including the chamber music
involving piano, comes from all periods.  It divides into Big and Small.
Obviously, the first two piano sonatas, the piano quintet, the cello
sonata, and the 12 American Preludes fall into the first category.
Ginastera arranged some of the rest from other works.  Milonga comes
from the late Thirties' 2 Songs, for voice and piano.  The three dances
from the ballet Estancia translate part of that work to the keyboard.
However, "small" doesn't necessarily imply "trivial" or "light." Ginastera
composed meticulously.  I doubt he ever threw off a composition in his
life.

I'll start with the big things first.  The sonatas show mainly two,
highly-contrasted moods: motor-like toccatas, derived I think from the
rhythm of the South American dance, the malambo; very lyrical, pensive
songs, the kind that one sings to oneself.  The first piano sonata belongs
to a time when Ginastera tried very hard to emulate Bartok's example,
but with themes and rhythms based on Argentinean folk music.  By me,
it's one of the great piano works of the century, fully the equal of
Bartok's own sonata of 1926.  I know that if you examined a score, you'd
find all sorts of fascinating relationships, since I can hear them in
performance.  The first movement, for example, varies two halves of an
initial idea throughout its entire length.  However, as with the Bartok
sonata, a listener need not consciously take any of the architecture in.
What comes across first is drive and passion, savage rhythms that get
the body jumping.  A troubled scherzo follows, with lots of cross-accents
evocative of Latin-American dance and with a Debussian trio. The movement
disappears in a puff of smoke.  The slow movement starts by evoking the
open strings of the guitar - an effect Ginastera exploited more than
once, notably in the Variaciones concertantes and in the guitar sonata.
A song rises to a passionate climax, diminishes the intensity to a tune
with a guitar-like accompaniment, and ends with a pianistic plucking of
guitar strings.  The finale, markedly similar -- primarily through the
same rhythm -- to that of the first piano concerto, stamps its way to a
powerful conclusion.  Overall, this sonata doesn't waste notes or time.
Ginastera strives for concision, every idea a winner, aiming for maximum
emotional effect.

The second sonata, one of the last things from the composer, takes the
concision even further.  For one thing, Ginastera eliminates the scherzo.
Barbara Nissman claims that the work shows an harmonic advance, and the
dissonance level has indeed probably risen.  I have no idea whether
Ginastera has in fact eliminated tonal centers, because it still sounds
like Ginastera to me.  The second movement, probably my favorite, is
another "impression" of South American native music, evoking above all
a wooden flute. It's very lonely music and reminds me, in a perverse
way, of those large Chinese landscape paintings with a single human
figure meditating in the midst of mountains, rivers, and waterfalls.
The finale pounds its way practically without let-up to the conclusion.
Ginastera avoids boredom by varying rhythms.  Another really wonderful
sonata and one which deserves the same sort of attention from pianists
as the first.

The third sonata, the very last Ginastera composition - written during
the composer's final illness - takes on the nature of meeting an obligation,
since he wrote it to fulfill a promise to Nissman that he would compose
something for her.  He originally thought of a concerto for piano and
percussion (shades of Bartok yet again), but ten years later still had
nothing written.  He probably knew he was running out of time - hence,
this one-movement sonata, another Ginasteran toccata.  I find it meanders
a bit.  But again, it's still Ginastera, and he has done marvelous things.
It bursts with that rhythmic dynamism he found early on and apparently
never lost.

In his various suites and morceaux, Ginastera reveals himself as a superb
miniaturist.  Miniatures usually rely less on structural techniques and
more on epigrammatic, immediately accessible ideas polished to maximum
effect.  You test a miniature by asking yourself whether it satisfies
you and whether you'd want to hear it again.  For me, Ginastera, who
always passes both tests, reached the apex of this vein in his 12 American
Preludes.  The sonatas, undoubtedly great music, nevertheless mine a
narrow expressive vein.  Ginastera's miniatures attract, not least because
of their variety of mood, melody, and rhythm.  Here, the composer shows
you his emotional and musical palette at its widest, if not its deepest.
However, American Preludes add up to more than the sum of the individual
items, most likely through their arrangement.  This is not only twelve
individual pieces, but a convincing artistic whole.  Including the word
"American" provokes the speculation that Ginastera wants to create a
music that brings up two large continents, distinct from Europe.  Some
of the pieces are, as you would expect, dances, including again the
malambo; some have the character of etudes; still others pay homage to
those Modernist composers who have marked the path Ginastera wants to
follow - Argentineans Juan Jose Castro and Roberto Garcia Morillo, the
Brazilian Villa-Lobos, and the U.  S.'s Aaron Copland.  The last pieces
don't bring up any of those composers to me, but Nissman disagrees with
me in the case of Copland.  She connects Ginastera's prelude to Copland's
early "Cat and Mouse." Certainly, the prelude conjures up that kind of
picture (something chased by something bigger and more menacing), but
yet again it sounds like Ginastera to me.  The final prelude, however,
calls to mind Debussy's sunken cathedral pretty strongly.  What does
that mean?  I've stepped more deeply into my own mind, rather than
Ginastera's if I try to answer that question, but I'll do it anyway.
Just about every American artist is formed by two muses: his own vernacular
idiom and the European tradition.  The artist tries to pull off the trick
of synthesizing these two strains into something characteristic, first
of himself and second of his milieu.  Arguably, we can view Ginastera
himself as an exemplar of this and the preludes as one such creation.

The piano quintet comes from around the same time as the first piano
concerto.  It too concerns itself with the big statement and a serious
outlook. It has much to admire.  The composer lays out the work in four
main movements - introduction, scherzo, slow movement, and finale - with
three cadenzas interspersed.  The cadenzas break down the quintet into
low strings (cello and viola), high strings (the two violins), and piano.
The textures are highly imaginative and individual.  I can't easily
recall a work that uses so many out-of-the-way string effects, other
than the Bartok fifth quartet.  However, I admire the quintet more than
I love it.  It belongs to those very few Ginastera works I think of as
the "tenure-track file." It's just not vulgar enough to suit me.  It
strikes me as something written to gain respect rather than something
the composer *had* to write.  I miss the typical drive and heartbreaking
lyricism.

No such problems with the cello sonata, however - a first movement full
of fireworks and lots of double-stopping for the cello, a slow movement
ardent and pensive by turns, and a crazed scherzo (at a subdued dynamic)
which slams into an explosive finale.  The composer wrote it for his
wife, Aurora, a cellist beyond the common, and gave her a masterpiece.
Again, some of the sounds Ginastera calls for from the solo instrument
run a little to the weird, including moans, slides, and scoops; you could
easily imagine them in an avant-garde piece whose only purpose was to
annoy you.  Ginastera, however, proves that music can come from even
outlandish devices, if shaped by someone really musical.

The two Pampeanas (did Ginastera make up that word?) have long ago passed
into the repertory of violinists and cellists.  The first, for violin,
opens with a recitative over the sounds of a guitar's open strings - one
of Ginastera's iconic devices.  For much of the time, the pianist doesn't
play at all, and the violin, with very few notes, sings and accompanies
itself.  The passage has an almost classical chasteness.  After the slow
introduction, the violin and piano take up a dance of many cross-accents:
often the old musical trick that six pulses to the measure break into
either two groups of three or three groups of two.  But it's fresh here
- vital and springy.  The end repeats the design so far - slow followed
by fast - in more concentrated form.  The second pampeana comes across
as more rhapsodic than the first.  The cello gets a greater opportunity
to sing in its own time than does the violin.  The work ends on still
another roaring malambo.

This set restores to the catalogue two important recordings (originally
on Newport Classics).  Pierian does heroic rescue work with taste and
imagination.  All the performers are wonderful, but two stand out.  Aurora
Natola-Ginastera plays her sonata and pampeana as if it came from her
blood.  These aren't easy works, and many performers turn them into mere
demonstrations of technique.  She makes music.  I have one quibble, but
that's with the engineering, where the balance of the cello sonata's
first movement allows the piano to dampen the cello often to mere buzzing.
I doubt this accurately reflects Natola-Ginastera's playing, because
she's wonderful in the other movements and in her pampeana.  The major
heroine of the set, however, has to be Barbara Nissman, a powerful pianist
and a musician of laser-like focus.  You know she has done all the
head-work on the sonatas, but she comes over as a force of nature.  She
not only gets the steel and rhythm of the toccatas (and power without
pounding), but above all she generates a wealth of color and an inexorable
musical line, whether loud or soft.  She hasn't had the career she
deserved, mainly, I believe, because she got pigeonholed as a Modern
"specialist" (her Prokofiev sonatas are tremendous as well).  Nevertheless,
I think she can play anything.  I'd love to hear her Beethoven or her
Chopin.  If she played Brahms, I'd love to hear that.  She has that
combination of ardor and intellect.  Strongly recommended.

Steve Schwartz