Ginastera: Glosses on Themes of Pablo Casals (2010)

Alberto Ginastera’s dazzling Glosses on Themes of Pablo Casals, heard here in both its original version for string quartet and string orchestra and its later fully-orchestrated version, pays tribute to his close friend, the legendary cellist (and composer) on the occasion of the centenary of Casals’s birth. The Variaciones concertantes places a variety of instruments in the limelight with featured solos, culminating in a virtuosic malambo, the archetypical gaucho ‘jousting’ dance whose vertiginous motion engenders frenetic enthusiasm among both participants and onlookers.