Panambí Op.1 (1934–7)

Leyenda coreografica en 1 acto

(choreographic legend in one act)

Claro de luna sobre el Paraná (Moonlight on the Paraná)

Fiesta indigena (Native Festival)

Ronda de las doncellas (Girls’ Round )Dance

Danza de los guerreros (Warriors’ Dance)

Escena (Scene)

Pantomima del amor eterno (Pantomime of Eternal Love)

Canto de Guirahú (Guirahú’s Song)

El Hechicero se dirige hacia Guirahú (The Sorcerer Approaches Guirahú)

Aparacen las deidades del agua (The Water Sprites Appear)

El Hechicero se esconde (The Sorcerer Hides)

Juego de las deidades del agua (The Water Sprites Play)

Reaparece el Hechicero (The Sorcerer Reappears)

Los gritos del Hechicero (The Sorcerer’s Cries)

Inquietud de la tribu (The tribe is Uneasy)

Súplica de Panambi (Panambí’s Prayer)

Invocación a los espírtus poderosos (Invocation to the Powerful Spirits)

Danza del Hechicero (The Sorcerer’s Dance)

El Hechicero hablá (The Sorcerer Speaks)

Lamento de las doncellas (The Girls’ Lament)

Aparición de Tupá (Tupá Appears)

Los guerreros amenazan al Hechicero (The Warriors Threaten the Sorcerer)

El Amanacer (Dawn)

Piano Concerto No.2 Op.39 (1972)

32 Variazioni sopra un accordo di Beethoven

Scherzo per la mano sinestra: Molto vivace

Quasi una fantasia: Adagietto – Adagio molto – Adagietto

Cadenza e Finale prestissimo: Maestoso e drammatico – Prestissimo

Ginastera wrote his Panambí ballet score when he was still a student at the Conservatorio Nacional in Buenos Aires. Although it was by no means the first work he completed, it was an astonishing achievement for a composer of little experience. Within months a concert suite taken from it was performed at the Teatro Colón and three years after that the ballet was successfully presented at the same theatre, leading to the commission for what is still his most popular composition, the ballet Estancia Op.6. By the age of 24 Ginastera had discovered what would long remain his two major sources of inspiration, the energy and poetry of life on the Argentine pampas, as represented in Estancia, and the mythology of the pre-columbian Guaneri civilisation in South America, the setting of Panambí.

Beginning on a moonlight night and ending with the dawning of a new day, Felix Errico’s    “choreographic legend” is about the love of Panambí, the beautiful daughter of the headman of the village, for Guirahú, the bravest warrior and hunter in the tribe. The one problem is that the village Sorcerer wants Panambí for himself. His plans to have Guirahú killed by a viper are thwarted by the Water Sprites who take Guirahú to safety in their watery home in the Paraná river. Panambí prays to the god Tupà for the return of her lover. The Sorcerer tells her of his passion and she angrily rejects him. In revenge he claims that the mighty spirits decree that Panambí must throw herself into the Paraná in search of Guirahú. Tupà intervenes, however, predicting that with the first rays of the sun her lover will return to her. Terrified by the threats of the warriors, the Sorcerer hides in his hut, where Tupá punishes him by transforming him into an enormous black bird. With the rise of the sun Guirahú emerges from the water and throws himself into Panambí's arms.

The most remarkable aspect of the Panambí score is not the external influences, which are obvious enough, but the young composer’s masterly control of his extensive orchestral forces not only in the pounding rhythms of the large-scale set pieces but also in the quieter atmospheric episodes – particularly, among the latter, those coloured by an uncommonly sensitive use of percussion. As for the material itself, alongside the echoes of Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky, there is much that is strikingly original. Here, to characterise an ancient and long-disappeared culture, Ginastera creates a sound world calculated to persuade the modern ear that it is in touch with reverberations from a primitive age.

There is an example of that in the first section, Moonlight on the Paraná, which opens not with suggestions of silver light glittering on the river but with the eerily lugubrious sound of bassoon and double bassoon, instruments later associated with the viperous Sorcerer. It is only with the entry of higher woodwind, harps and subtly assorted percussion, at one point suggesting nocturnal bird song, that the moon is heard to shine. The melody that serenely floats by on the four horns represents the river itself.

Between the moonlit introduction and the corresponding break of day at the end of the ballet, energetic and often fierce dances are intermingled with more lyrical scenes. The short Native Feast is dominated by a brutal 6/8 ostinato on timpani and torn by jagged cross-rhythms on brass, inevitably recalling Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The Girls’ Round Dance effectively offsets the virile Warriors’ Dance where heavily stamping feet project ever more energy into the progress towards its explosive climax.

Scene, which briefly recalls motifs from the introduction, is followed by two sections devoted to the relationship between Panambí and Guirahú, their Pantomime of Eternal Love and Guirahú’s song, both of them featuring expressive wind solos. Except in the central birdsong episode, Guirahú’s song is clearly inspired by Debussy in its seductive writing for unaccompanied flute. The Water Sprites Play is a lively dance central to a group of otherwise short episodes devoted to the Sorcerer’s attempt on Guirahú’s life and his rescue by the Water Sprites. It is not surprising that the Sorcerer takes fright at the ferocious anger represented    by The Tribe is Uneasy. Panambí’s Prayer, a clarinet’s imploring address to the god Tupá, is followed by the Sorcerer’s unwelcome confession, through the double bassoon, of his passion for her.

The Sorcerer summons his allies in Invocation of the Powerful Spirits, an unholy drumming in varying metres on timpani with interjections from the brass. In the next section he performs his own dance to the accompaniment of ostinato rhythms on a weirdly coloured ensemble of untuned percussion and a hypnotically repeated phrase on the xylophone. When The Sorcerer Speaks he repeats the Powerful Spirits’ decree that to recover her lover Panambí must throw herself into the river. This provokes not only The Girls’ Lament but also, at the most dramatic moment in the score, the intervention of Tupá and another vivid display of foot-stamping anger from the Warriors.

As Tupá predicted, Guirahú and Panambí and are reunited as a new day dawns – just as the lovers are reunited after the intervention of the god Pan in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, as Ginastera was evidently not unaware. Of course, the river motif recalled at the beginning by the four horns and developed by the strings has nothing to do with the earlier work and the characteristically brilliant simulation of birdsong is quite unlike Ravel’s. The rustling woodwind arpeggios and the chorus of female voices, on the other hand, clearly owe their presence to the Ravel precedent. Nothing, however, could have been more effective in enriching the texture as the rapturous melody carried by the strings and horns approaches its ecstatic climax.

The Second Piano Concerto was written at the other end of Ginastera’s career, shortly after he had left Argentina to settle in Geneva, where he was to remain for the last 12 years of his life. He was by then well into what he called his “neo-expressionist” period, during which, as the term suggests, he developed an interest in the ideas of the Second Viennese School. Even so, while he adopted serialism and practised a form of the 12-note technique, his music sounds not much like that of Schoenberg or Berg or any of their Viennese contemporaries. He had his own creative personality and he had his own way of keeping in touch with tradition.

The basic material of the Second Piano Concerto is derived from the shatteringly dissonant seven-note chord in the last movement of Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony, where it provokes the bass soloist to make his first entry with the words, “Oh friends, not those sounds!” [O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!”]. From that Beethoven chord Ginastera created a seven-note series and added the remaining five notes to make a 12-note row, which is heard rising through piano and strings in unison in the opening bars. This is the first of 32 variations on the Beethoven chord. Since they are all short, some of them lasting no more than a few seconds, the variations are divided according to their tempo into groups: three quick groups alternating with two slower ones. The last group increases in tempo until it comes to a forcefully emphatic reminder of the Beethoven chord scored much as in the “Choral” Symphony.

In the second movement the pianist is required to play with the left hand only. Impelled for the most part in triplet rhythms, it is a transparently textured Scherzo where the much of the colour interest is in Ginastera’s characteristically imaginative use of an exotic percussion section and muted strings in fleeting relationships at all dynamic levels with the solo part.

Like the first movement, the title of which recalls that of Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor, the third movement refers to a Beethoven piano work: its    Quasi una fantasia title echoes that of the “Moonlight” sonata. Its free form allows brief episodes of Lutoslawski-style controlled improvisation in is a mainly very slow fantasy on the 12-note row.

The last movement begins with a cadenza described by the composer as “a splendid fanfare” Marked Maestoso e drammatico, it treats the piano as a mighty percussion instrument able to compete not only with liberated timpani and other drums but also with strings and wind at a dynamic level rarely falling below fortissimo. Its uninhibited and prolonged climax is followed without a break by the Prestissimo finale. Ginastera reverts here to the impulse of the Scherzo but at a still quicker tempo and with the pianist free to use both hands. Their freedom is limited, however: they are tied together, each with just one line of triplets in rhythmic unison with the other. With the role of the orchestra reduced to adding colour, this last movement resembles nothing so much as the Presto finale of Chopin’s Sonata in B    flat minor and indeed, as another gesture to tradition, it is based on the same 11-note theme.

An immensely challenging work for audience and performers alike, Ginastera’s Second Piano Concerto was commissioned for Hilder Somer, to whom it is dedicated, and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

Gerald Larner © 2016