Alberto Ginastera—Portrait of an Argentine Composer

Extract

In February of this year the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, under the direction of Dmitri Mitropoulos, gave two performances of Alberto Ginastera's Overture to the “Creole” Faust, one of which was broadcast on a national network. In April of last year the famed Budapest Quartet, which seldom ventures into contemporary music, performed Ginastera's First String Quartet at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.) and subsequently took this work on tour through South America. Last year, also, two important recordings of his music were released in the United States: one was the same quartet played by the Paganini Quartet, the other was the Variaciones concertantes played by the Minneapolis Symphony under the direction of Antal Dorati. Previously, the Louisville Orchestra had recorded his Pampeana No. 3, a score commissioned by that orchestra (in Louisville, Kentucky) for its contemporary music series. And in 1952 his Sonata for Piano was recorded by Johana Harris, who had performed it for the first time anywhere at the Pittsburgh Festival of Contemporary Music that same year. These, as viewed by an American, are some of the recent events that indicate recognition of the growing stature of this forty-one-year-old Argentine composer, as he appears on the musical scene to-day.