“Alberto Ginastera’s relative absence from concert halls today is striking given his strong presence in the United States a half-century ago,” writes William Robin in Wednesday’s (3/2) New York Times about upcoming performances of the composer’s work at Trinity Wall Street led by Julian Wachner. The concerts offer “a lens into a fascinating and overlooked era in the career of a major Latin American composer.… ‘He’s a composer that everybody should know more about,’ Julian Wachner, Trinity’s director of music and the arts, said.… Last February, Mr. Wachner conducted Trinity’s forces in Ginastera’s grand and rarely heard oratorio ‘Turbae ad Passionem Gregorianam’ at Carnegie Hall. Now, for the church’s ‘Revolutionaries’ festival, which will unfold over the next two months, he chose to focus on Ginastera’s later period, which the composer characterized as ‘neo-Expressionism,’ encompassing music written from 1958 until his death.” Programs will pair “the Argentine composer’s music with the late works of Beethoven, as two complementarily revolutionary artists.… Despite its intellectual underpinnings, [Ginastera’s later] music is consistently theatrical rather than cerebral, as in the searing Piano Concerto No. 1, which the Los Angeles Philharmonic will present at David Geffen Hall on March 14.”
Posted March 4, 2016
