Ginastera: Four Dances from Estancia
Alberto Ginastera
B. April 11, 1916 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
D. June 25, 1983 in Geneva, Switzerland
Alberto Ginastera wandered far from his native Argentina during his life, but in spirit he never left home. Even in his more cosmopolitan works, there are hints of folk music, the sounds of the guitar, the rhythms of popular dance. In his early years, nearly all his works were steeped in native music: the ballet Panambí, the Malambo for piano, the song cycle Horas de una estancia, and the present ballet suite.
A commission for Estancia came to Ginastera from Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, but before it could stage a performance, the company dissolved. To salvage the music, the composer extracted a suite of four dances; the full ballet had to wait nine more years for its first performance.
The title comes from the Argentinean word for ranch, which for Ginastera and others in his country conjures up a range of powerful feelings. As he explained in a program note for a later work Pampanea No. 3:
“Whenever I have crossed the pampa or have lived in it for a time, my spirit felt itself inundated by changing impressions, now joyful, now melancholy, some full of euphoria and others replete with a profound tranquility, produced by its limitless immensity and by the transformation that the countryside undergoes in the course of the day…Already in some moments of my ballet Estancia the landscape appears as a veritable protagonist, imposing its influence upon the feelings of the characters.”
That feeling of almost-human character in the land is palpable in the first movement of the suite, where powerful rhythms and brash orchestration suggest a wild landscape. The “Wheat Dance” nicely evokes the “profound tranquility” Ginastera mentioned above; in the last two movements, crisp, sharp rhythms once again carry the music along. Most interesting from a folkloric point of view is the final “Malambo,” which in Argentina was both a dance and a ritual. A history book published in Buenos Aires in 1883 describes its importance:
“In the matter of dances, none is comparable to the malambo. It is the gaucho’s ‘tournament’ when he feels the urge to display his skill as a dancer. Two men place themselves opposite each other. The guitars flood the rancho with their chords, and one of the gauchos begins to dance; then he stops and his opponent continues; and so it goes on. Many times the justa lasts from six to seven hours… The onlookers applaud, shout, and make bets on one dancer or the other, while even the women and children are swept along by the frenetic enthusiasm engendered by the vertiginous motion.”
The DSO last performed Estancia in February 2007.
DSO Shop @ the Max Recomm ends: Ginastera, Estancia: Four Dances: Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Deutsche Grammophon B0011340.
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