Miró Quartet Surveys Ginastera Quartets

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

It seems as if this year my encounters with the PENTATONE label seem to involve anniversaries. Almost exactly three months ago, I wrote about the Quatuor Diotima album devoted entirely to the “Livre pour quatuor” composed by Pierre Boulez, released a few weeks after the composer’s birth on March 26, 1925. This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the Miró Quartet, which was founded by four students at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. One week from today, that occasion will be celebrated with the release of their latest album, devoted entirely to the complete (three) quartets composed by Alberto Ginastera. As most readers will probably expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for pre-orders.

Ironically, the booklet for his album never mentions the membership of this ensemble. According to their Wikipedia page, those members are violinists Daniel Ching and William Fedkenheuer, John Largess on viola, and Joshua Gindele on cello. Four of the five movements of the last quartet involves vocal settings of texts by Juan Ramón-Jiménez and Federico García Lorca). The vocalist for these tracks is soprano Kiera Duffy.

Ginastera was born on April 11, 1916 and died at the age of 67 on June 25, 1983. During my student days, his name received more attention than any opportunities to listen to his music, whether in performance or on recordings. There was a tendency to view his music as a Latin perspective on the Second Viennese School. While the advance material I received associated him with Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky, I found myself thinking more about Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite.”

The dates of the three quartets cover a generous span of the composer’s life: 1948, 1958 (revised in 1968), and 1973. That period covers the time I spent as a student at the campus radio station of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, I have to confess that, over that rather generous span on time, I do not think I ever encountered any of Ginastera’s music. I am pretty sure that none of my teachers had anything to say about him, meaning that, if I had encountered his name at all, it probably would have been through Time magazine!

That said, I have listened to this new quartet album several times. The ensemble had an Artist Residency at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), which included a recital in January of 2017; but I was unable to attend the performance. However, looking back about a decade earlier, I discovered I had encountered Ginastera’s second quartet there in November of 2008 as part of the String and Piano Chamber Music series of concerts. On the basis of what I wrote at that time, I would say that it reinforced the “Bartók connection,” which was further reinforced by the fact that Ginastera published an article entitled "Homage to Béla Bartók" in 1981! Those familiar with Bartók's fifth string quartet (number 102 in András Szöllősy's chronological Sz. numbers) are likely to agree with that reinforcement!