Estancia

Ballet in one act and five scenes

Scene 1: El amanecer (Dawn)

Introducción y escena (Introduction and Scene)

Pequeña danza (Little Dance)

Scene 2: La mañana (Morning)

Danza del trigo (Wheat Dance)

Los trabajadores agrícolas (The Farm workers)

Los peones de hacienda (The Cattlemen)

Los puebleros (The Townsfolk)

Scene 3: La tarde (Afternoon)

Triste pampeano (Pampas Melancholy)

La doma (The Rodeo)

Idilio crepuscular (Twilight Idyll)

Scene 4: La noche (Night)

Nocturno (Nocturne)

Scene 5: El Amanecer (Dawn)

Scena (Scene)

Danza final: Malambo (Final Dance: Malambo)

Ollantay

Tres Movimientos Sinfónicos (Three Symphonic Movements)

Paisaje de Ollantaytambo (The Landscape of Ollantayambo)

Los guerreros (The Warriors)

La muerte de Ollantay (The Death of Ollantay)

Pampeana No.3

Pastoral Sinfónica (Symphonic Pastorale)

Adagio contemplativo

Impetuosamente

Largo con poetica esaltazione

When Alberto Ginastera (1916–83) wrote the first work he thought worth preserving, the ballet Panambí Op.1, he was still a student at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Buenos Aries. But even at this early stage he had found the source of inspiration that would sustain him through a career of such distinction that he would be acknowledged not only as the leading Argentine composer of his day but also as one of the heroes of Latin-American music in general.

That enduring source of inspiration was Argentina itself – in two main aspects, its pre-Columbian legacy on the one hand and the vast landscapes of the pampas on the other. After Panambi, based on an ancient legend of the Guaraní Indians, Ginastera was to return to the myths of pre-columbian cultures in several later works (including Ollantay Op.17, featured on this disc). In the meantime he turned to the pampas for the setting for his second ballet, Estancia Op.2, which was commissioned in 1941 by Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan but which was dropped on the sudden disbandment of the company and had to wait for its first performance until 1952. The consolation was that a concert suite of four dances from Estancia was such a success on its first performance by the orchestra of the Teatro Colón in 1943 that it established the young composer’s reputation.

Set on an estancia (or cattle ranch) the ballet is based on the way of life of the gauchos (or cowboys) who work in the wide open spaces of the Argentinean pampas – a civilisation away from the urban culture that was to inspire the sophisticated music of his now more famous compatriot and pupil Astor Piazzolla. There are no seductive tangos here. As the city boy finds, life on the estancia is hard and he stands no chance with the country girl he falls in love with unless he can prove himself as virile as the gauchos themselves.

For Ginastera the essential music of the pampas was the malambo, an exclusively masculine, competitive dance in which the gauchos vied with each other to demonstrate their superior machismo. In Estancia no fewer than six episodes, well over half the score, are based on the malambo or derived from it in one way or another. The Introduction to the first scene of the dawn-to-dawn scenario is a characteristic example, an energetic 6/8, its joltingly displaced rhythmic accents on wind and strings intensified by a colourful percussion section. In this case it is brought to a halt to make way for a piano to pick out and sustain a rising series of fourths and thirds, representing the open strings of the guitar. Against that harmony, which is fundamental to the whole ballet and a recurring feature of Ginastera’s music, the baritone soloist sets the scene by reciting lines from Martin Fierro by José Hernández, a 19th-century Argentine epic poem similarly fundamental to Ginastera’s evocation of life on the pampas.

The following Little Dance is also in 6/8 but quicker and, except when malambo syncopations are introduced in the middle section, more lightly scored than the opening movement. The Wheat Dance at the beginning of the second scene, The Morning, though still in 6/8 time, offers a timely contrast. Pizzicato strings and piano support a gracefully drawn line on solo flute which then passes the melodic interest to horns and, towards the end, a particularly expressive solo violin. The Agricultural Workers make their vigorous entry in 6/8 to malambo rhythms. After a crescendo on timpani, the Cattlemen reply in a still quicker tempo with the 6/8 metre startlingly distorted at first by three additional quavers in every bar and later by interventions of septuple time. The predominantly fierce instrumental colours here are supplied mainly by timpani, horns and trumpets. The Townsfolk, though lively enough, cannot compete in this company. They enter in a civilised 4/8 time and when they find their way into 6/8 they adopt the familiar syncopations not in a show of physical strength but in an intellectually conceived fugue, starting on the flute and eventually involving the whole orchestra.

The third scene, The Afternoon, begins with a song of unrequited love, Pampas Melancholy, for the baritone soloist. His situation improves with The Rodeo – another 6/8 dance and the most dynamic episode so far – where the city boy’s skill in taming wild horses wins the admiration of the girl he has so far admired in vain. They express their love in Twilight Idyll, beautifully written for strings and woodwind and the most lyrical music in the whole ballet. It is followed at the beginning of thee fourth scene, Night, by a magical Nocturne including an atmospheric role for the baritone. Another day dawns at the beginning of the fifth scene with a slower (3/4) version of the 6/8 music from the beginning of the first scene followed by a short interlude featuring woodwind and muted trumpet. With a sensational and brilliantly sustained display of 6/8 malambo energy in the competitive Final Dance the city boy proves himself no less well-endowed with machismo than any of his gaucho companions.

Like the early Panambí ballet, Ollantay is inspired by pre-columbian culture. According to a preface to the score, it is based on a dramatic poem of Inca origin: “The story revolves round the myth of Ollantay, son of the Earth, who opposes Inca, son of the Sun. The latter declares war on Ollantay for profaning the Temple of the Virgins in an attempt to abduct Coyllur, the daughter of Inca. The tragedy brings conflict to the empire. Ollantay resists for a long period of time in his fortress until he is defeated and killed.” Lacking in detail though this version of the legend is, with the brief notes supplied by the composer it offers enough information to illuminate a score which treats the story by creating atmosphere rather than by matching musical with narrative events.

The Landscape of Ollantaytambo: “In the lonely night of Ollantaytambo, Ollantay emerges to evoke the outcry of disappeared cities.” The loneliness of the night is reflected at first by the entry of a solitary flute which is scarcely less lonely when    joined by oboe and muted horn in counterpoint. Ollantay’s lament for the cities that have disappeared is expressed first by the entry of muted violas and cellos with a plaintively chromatic melody which persists on strings and brass in spite of warlike interventions on timpani and shrieking woodwind. A central fanfare-like climax precedes a return of the chromatic melody and a quiet ending.

The Warriors: “The warriors of Ollantay dance while they prepare for war. Excited, they imitate armies in battle.” Timpani are again prominent, this time beating out a regular 2/4 which is interrupted by jagged intrusions of 5/8 or 7/8 on woodwind, brass and percussion. A new aggressive idea in 2/4 enters on horns and cellos and spreads through the orchestra as woodwind add another layer of activity on the way to a quicker and still more intense middle section. After a return of the opening section, a Presto e agitato coda ends the movement in a paroxysm of excitement.

The Death of Ollantay: “Ollantay, imprisoned by Inca, forecasts the destruction of the Empire and the disappearance of the race of the sons of the Sun. Ollantay dies and solitude invades the Andine valleys.” Against an undulating background the chromatic lament and the fanfare material from the first movement are recalled on woodwind and brass rising to a dynamic extreme before subsiding to a recall of the lonely flute solo from the beginning of the work. A series of sharp stabs marks the death of Ollantay before the quiet ending.

Ollantay is dedicated to Erich Kleiber, who conducted the first performance with the orchestra of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1949.

“Whenever I have crossed the pampa or have lived in it for a time, my spirit has 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.” It was in that spirit that Ginastera wrote three works under the title Pampeana – two chamber pieces in 1947 and 1950 respectively and a third for orchestra in 1954. While the landscape is the same as that of Estancia, the treatment of its musical associations is different at this stage in his career. The composer was now in the second of what he was later to identify as the three periods of his composing career: to distinguish it from the first period of “objective nationalism”, when he was drawing directly on Argentine folk music, he described the second as “subjective nationalism” when he was using the same kind material in a more personal and abstract form in accordance with the development of his harmonic ideas.

The opening Adagio contemplativo, a nocturne perhaps, begins in characteristic “subjective nationalism” mode. The rising fourths on cellos and basses, derived from the open strings of the guitar, are an Argentine allusion but at the same time they are a stage in the loosening of tonality that was to characterise Ginastera’s third period of “neo-Expressionism”.    The following slow fugal passage, initiated by violas, on a theme including all but one of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale points in the same direction. After a middle section of woodwind figuration rippling round a sustained melody on oboe then trumpet, the contemplative opening bars are recalled.

The hard-driven second movement, Impetuosamente, is related in its 6/8 rhythms to the malambo in Estancia but this is a wilder version of the dance relentlessly propelled by repeated quavers, usually on lower strings and percussion, as every section of the orchestra joins in projecting themes violently disruptive in their syncopations. A slower Intermezzo reduces the aggression but without suppressing it entirely before the opening section returns to achieve a climax of even greater physical intensity.   

The “profound tranquillity” experienced by Ginastera in the pampas is re-created in the slow last movement. An expressive widely spaced melody introduced by oboe under a flute ostinato passes from woodwind to upper and lower strings to secure, except in a central impassioned climax, that exalted emotion. Towards the end an agglomeration of fourths and thirds, rising through the orchestra from muted double basses and reflecting again the tuning of the six-string guitar, is sustained to a fortissimo climax before the scene gradually dies away.

Gerald Larner © 2015