Notes for: July 21, 2009
Following the death of the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos in 1959, Alberto Ginastera of Argentina emerged as Latin America’s best known classical composer. His reputation in the United States rested on three operas – Don Rodrigo, Bomarzo and Beatrix Cenci – and a series of instrumental works blending native Argentine folklore elements with Schoenberg’s 12-tone method and polytonality.
Ginastera was born in Buenos Aires, the son of Catalonian and Italian immigrants. He started piano lessons at the age of seven, and at twelve entered the Conservatorio Williams in Buenos Aires. From 1936 to 1938 he studied at the National Conservatory, graduating with the highest honors and in 1941 becoming a professor of composition. With the rise to power of dictator Juan Peron, he ran into difficulties with the authorities, and in 1945, supported by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, he moved to the United States and then traveled widely in Europe. With the fall of Peron in 1955, he returned to Argentina.
Ginastera’s experience in the United States and Europe exposed him to musical trends and composing techniques outside Argentina, and on his return to Argentina he and several colleagues founded the Composers’ League to promote a new kind of music merging indigenous materials with imported practices. He also founded the Latin American Center for Advanced Music Studies, and in 1958 was named dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Argentine Catholic University. In 1968, restless again, he returned to the United States, and in 1970 moved to Europe, settling in Geneva where he spent the rest of his life.
As a composer, Ginastera wrote 55 works in virtually all forms. He composed three operas; five ballets; six concertos for various instruments; two symphonies and other orchestral works; two choir works; music for piano, voice, organ, flute and guitar; and three string quartets and other chamber music.
He began his career as a confirmed Argentinian nationalist, using folk and popular elements in a straightforward manner. As he matured and traveled outside Argentina, he began to abstract the rhythmic and stylistic elements from this folk orientation and to merge them with more classical forms of western music. Finally, continuing but subordinating these folk elements, he turned to a highly personal brand of atonal and serial techniques and a preoccupation with sound timbres.
Composed in 1934, Impressions of the Puna is an example of Ginastera’s early orientation as an Argentinian nationalist, in this case his interest in Latin America’s pre-Colombian heritage. The title refers to the bleak, rocky wasteland high in the northern Andes, the heart of the old Inca empire. Ginastera’s brief, three-movement work evokes both the remote mountain landscape and the indigenous Indian music.
The first movement, Quena, takes its caption from the cane flute, a legacy from the Incas, used by South American Indians for both solo improvisation and to accompany songs. The movement begins with a sad downward strain leading to a solo melody by the solitary flute.
The second movement, Cancion, echoes a yaravi, a melancholy song of lost love, but closes in a pulsing rhythm. The third movement, Danza, is a whirling dance sandwiching a slower middle interlude, with the flute playing flamboyant arabesques.