Alongside his one-time pupil Astor Piazzolla, Albert Ginastera is the most significant composer from Argentina to date. The centenary of Ginastera’s birth next year may prompt more interest in the whole range of his music, which includes three operas, a couple of ballets and six concertos, but it’s the piano music that François-Xavier Poizat samples in his recital. The first of the three piano sonatas, composed in 1952 and full of motorik, Bartókian energy and angular, sometimes 12-note, melodic lines, is the centrepiece. If the strenuous piano writing often seems more like bluster and posturing than genuinely felt music, it’s in the early sets of smaller pieces around the sonata that Poizat’s stylish playing reveals more of Ginastera’s real musical character. The use of folk melodies in the Danzas Argentinas, the Suite de Danzas Criollas and the Three Pieces Op 6 seems affectionate and totally unselfconscious; every one is a perfectly pitched miniature, even if a few occasionally topple over the edge into sentimentality.
