The Strad Recommends: Miró Quartet: Ginastera

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: August 2025

Description: A quartet marks its 30th birthday on searing form

Musicians: Miró Quartet, Kiera Duffy (soprano)

Works: Ginastera: String Quartets nos.1–3

Catalogue number: PENTATONE PTC5187412

A generation behind their Brazilian counterparts encouraged by Mário de Andrade, Argentinian composers began to absorb the tenets of European modernism and make them their own in a distinctively national style. Foremost among them, from the late 1940s onwards, was Alberto Ginastera, but the personal and arduous nature of that process could not be rushed, as the Miró’s chronological journey through his string quartets makes clear.

Bartók’s Allegro barbaro style hangs over the circular patterns of the First Quartet (1948) and much of the Second (1958), for all that the latter work incorporates twelve-tone technique within a formal scheme inherited from Bartók’s Fifth. The performances can hardly be faulted for controlled energy or colour, but Ginastera is wearing second-hand suits until the scintillating Presto magico at the heart of the Second and then an achingly sad sequence of recitatives, sung with a contained power of oratory by cellist Joshua Gindele and violist John Largess.

With the Third Quartet of 1973, Ginastera created his masterpiece (at least in the quartet genre), breathing the air of other planets after the fashion of Schoenberg’s Second but taking a soprano for company from the outset. The slow pile-up of immaculately pitched clusters to open the work is as magical as Kiera Duffy’s hieratical confiding of secrets to the microphone in settings of three Spanish poets: ‘Music – naked woman – running crazy through the pure night.’ It seems hard to believe that the Miró has been together for 30 years (28 in the same line-up); or that it has done anything finer on record.

PETER QUANTRILL