Estancia, ballet suite, Op.8a

Los trabajadores agricolas (The Land Workers)

Danza del trigo (Wheat Dance)

Los peones de haciendas (The Cattle Men)

Danza final: malambo (Final Dance: malambo)

The earliest Argentinean music you are likely to hear in the concert hall - on this side of the Atlantic at least - is Ginastera’s ballet Estancia. There is an earlier Ginastera ballet called Panambi but, in spite of its originality in discovering an authentic Argentinean idiom, it has not secured a regular place in the repertoire. Even so, Panambi was successful enough on its first performance in 1940 to attract the attention of Lincoln Kirstein, director of the American Ballet Caravan, who commissioned a new piece from the young composer for a projected South American tour in 1941. Unfortunately, Kirstein’s company was dissolved in the following year and Estancia was not performed as a ballet until 1952. In the meantime, however, Ginastera had assembled a concert suite of four dances from Estancia which won immediate popularity and which remains the most frequently performed of all his scores.

Set on an estancia (or cattle ranch) Ginastera’s second ballet is based on the way of life of the gauchos (or cowboys) who work in the wide open spaces of the Argentinean pampas (or plains) - a civilisation away from the urban culture that inspired 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 girl he falls in love with there unless he can prove himself as virile as the gauchos themselves.

Ginastera’s music for Estancia is correspondingly muscular, drawing on actual gauchesco sources for some of its material but turning also to Copland’s earlier Ballet Caravan score Billy the Kid for outdoor atmosphere and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for dangerous primitivism. The first dance, The Land Workers, is a characteristic example of hard-drummed, brass-edged repeated rhythms with the occasional Hispanic melodic inflection but no extended line to mitigate the percussive toughness of the textures. The Wheat Dance, the one lyrical episode in the whole suite, is a timely intervention for elegant flute, romantic horns and expressive strings before the entry of The Cattle Men, who are no less vigorous and no more flexible in rhythm than their land-worker colleagues and even heavier on their feet. They are formidable opposition for the city boy who, however, in the final malambo (a traditional gaucho competitive dance) proves himself more than their equal in sustained and aggressively heel-stamping vitality.