Alberto Ginastera divided his own composing career into three phases, and each of his string quartets falls conveniently into one of those phases. Composed in 1948, String Quartet No 1 belongs to what Ginastera called his period of “objective nationalism”, when, following the example of his teacher Aaron Copland, he incorporated the folk music of his native Argentina more or less unaltered into his own music; 10 years later, in the “subjective nationalism” of the second quartet, those colouristic elements have been absorbed into the energised textures of his works, which are organised using Schoenberg’s 12-note technique.
As the Miró Quartet’s performances of the first two quartets show, both are attractive works, full of vivid incident, which deserve to be included in recitals far more often than they are. But it’s the third quartet that’s the real discovery here. By the time it was composed in 1973, Ginastera was living in Europe (he would die in Geneva in 1983) and in what he described as his “neo-expressionism” phase. Taking its cue from Schoenberg’s second quartet, it adds a solo soprano to the lineup, for passionate, dramatic settings of texts by three 20th-century Spanish poets: Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti. The recording places the soprano, Kiera Duffy, rather farther forward than ideal, but there’s no denying that the effect is totally compelling.
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