Alberto Ginastera
Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2

LA RECENSIONE

Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) is unanimously recognized as one of the greatest composers of 20th-century Latin America as well as one of the most interesting of the same century internationally.

In this 2001 album, the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Julio Malaval and the dry and impeccable pianism of concert artist Dora De Marinis, an Argentine like her colleague Marta Argerich, offer us a textbook recording of two piano and orchestra concertos by the great Argentine composer. Serialism, polytonality, aleatory procedures, quarter tones, take on the connotation of a neo-expressionism, following the periods of "Objective Nationalism" and "Subjective Nationalism."

In adherence to a rigorous classical orchestration never entirely abandoned, Ginastera incorporates fresh and innovative elements in the first concerto such as cascades of descending octaves in a serial order of twenty notes, chordal blocks entrusted to the orchestra, descending and ascending arpeggios on the piano with degrees of difficulty at the physical limits of the instrument, the supernatural and fantastic magic of the Argentine Pampas is applied to chromatic intervals and four pppp of the strings and percussion instruments. The violence of the Gaucho and the typical Argentine Malambo is a chromatic explosion of colors in aggressive movements like the Toccata concertata where the entire percussive arsenal of the orchestra interacts with the piano at the limits of paroxysm.

In the second concerto composed in 1972, we find four movements in search of new sound forms, including the 32 variations on a Beethoven chord based on the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony, which becomes F-A-D-C-sharp-E-G-Bb and C-Eb-Gb-Ab-B, deriving new harmonic and melodic material from the transposition of the two series, each having its own characteristic: technical for the piano, tonal for the orchestra, in a growing and kaleidoscopic exchange of microtones and timbres between orchestra and piano.

An important and significant page in the evolution of 20th-century classical/contemporary music, from one of its most interesting composers alongside Ligeti, Varese, Nono, Boulez, Messiaen, despite the profound stylistic and language differences.

Franco De Biase