Miró Quartet & Kiera Duffy: Ginastera String Quartets
Pentatone

Celebrating their group's thirtieth anniversary and building on the momentum generated by their Grammy-nominated 2024 release Home, violinists Daniel Ching and William Fedkenheuer, violist John Largess, and cellist Joshua Gindele devote their third Miró Quartet album on Pentatone to the complete string quartets of Alberto Ginastera (1916-83). This seventy-two-minute collection is not only essential listening for admirers of the composer but for anyone hungry for string quartet playing of the highest calibre. The energy and conviction the four bring to this recording invites a new appreciation of this remarkably innovative Latin American composer.

Ginastera's music is generally distinguished by passionate emotional expression and a sensibility equally indebted to the Argentine folk and modernist traditions. What makes this set particularly fascinating is that each quartet originates from distinct periods in his career. While the three works form a cohesive whole, each is different from the others, with the folkloric drive of the first followed by the probing introspection of the second and poetic intensity of the third. Bolstering its impact, the latter augments the quartet with voice, in this case the terrific soprano Kiera Duffy. It's possible to detect echoes of fellow twentieth-century pioneers in Ginastera's writing, be it Bartók or Stravinsky, but the quartets make clear that his voice was indelibly his own, something any listener coming away from this trilogy of pieces will recognize. It doesn't hurt that Miró Quartet delivers performances that are visceral and raw in their ferocity.

As Largess astutely argues in liner notes, Ginastera did for the music of Argentina what Copland and Bartók did for their own respective countries' music cultures. In the violist's words, each “turned to the folk traditions and the rich myths of their homeland as inspiration to create an art music of revolutionary musical style, at once radical and innovative yet with a traditional national culture ever at its heart”—the latter part in particular a succinct characterization of Ginastera's music. Following the composer's lead, Largess associates each quartet with a distinct period: the first with Objective Nationalism, the second Subjective Nationalism, and the third Neo-Expressionism. In Objective Nationalism, Argentine folk elements emerge conspicuously; in Subjective Nationalism, Argentine elements remain but couple with dissonance and modernist gestures; and in Neo-Expressionism, mystical aspects are incorporated to produce material that's evocative, mysterious, and enigmatic.

Written in 1948, Quartet No. 1, Op. 20 celebrates the gaucho and does so through the integration of the malambo, the folk dance associated with these “landless native horsemen of the Argentinian plains.” That element permeates the first and fourth movements in particular, with the central two given scherzo- and adagio-styled treatments. Miró's players dig into the opening allegro with searing intensity, the aggressiveness of their attack lending the music an almost violent air. Spiccato bowing gives the performance thrust, after which the “Vivacissimo” movement perpetuates the percussive drive of the first with its own feverishly delivered patterns. The frenetic pace slows for the haunting slow movement, whose dreamlike aura crystallizes out of a six-note chord replicating the open strings of the guitar, the instrument most associated with the gauchos. Its calming quiet is disrupted by the onset of the fourth movement when its reinstates the high-velocity of the opening with unstoppable force.

Ten years separate the first quartet from Quartet No. 2, Op. 26 (twenty if you include the 1968 revision), which eschews folkloric elements for dissonance, with Ginastera creating the piece in accordance with Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Interestingly, one notices this aspect less when the opening movement exudes furious rhythmic urgency. In contrast to the four-part structure of the first quartet, the five-part second is in a symmetrical arch design that has a goblin-esque scherzo at its centre and an allegro and adagio on each side. Calling Bartók to mind, the “Adagio angoscioso” is less serene than anguished, while the “Libero e rapsodico” movement arrests for presenting a series of variations on the song “Triste el día sin sol, triste la noche sin luna...” from the composer's own Cinco Canciones Populares Argentinas. The aptly marked “Furioso” movement concludes the work with thrust so relentless it verges on savage.

Speaking of Schoenberg, Ginastera was inspired in the writing of his Quartet No. 3, Op. 40 (1973) by Schoenberg's use of the soprano voice in his Second String Quartet. Four of the five movements incorporate texts from poems by Spanish poets Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, and Rafael Alberti, with love, music, and war the topics explored. Beginning mysteriously, “Contemplativo” eases us into the work with dissonant string clusters before the entrance of Duffy's commanding voice. A celebration of music's inestimable power (“In the tranquil night, you are the water, pure melody, who keeps the stars fresh…”), the hallucinatory movement bewitches as it alternates between dramatic declamations and hushed spoken passages. The eeriness of the opening extends into the shuddering “Fantastico” movement, the only non-vocal one, and continues into “Amoroso” with Lorca meditating on music and love. A soldier's death is reflected upon during the agitated “Drammatico,” after which "Di nuovo contemplativo” takes up the theme with its own ruminations on the soldier and the silence that attends his demise.

While Ginastera wrote these string quartets between the 1940s and ‘70s, they sound like recently created works when they exude so much vitality and invention. Nothing about their rhythms and melodies has dated, and the audacity of Ginastera's writing is resoundingly accounted for. Miró Quartet named itself after the Spanish artist Joan Miró, of course, who helped revolutionize twentieth-century art with his Surrealist imagery. Something similar might be said for Ginastera when his quartets are such vital additions to the string quartet repertoire.

September 2025