With two audience-friendly Latin American composers of different generations plus distinguished soloists conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, how could this album not be a good idea? Or at least an OK idea? The two pieces here – by Mexico City-based Arturo Márquez, completed in 2000, and the full 1941 ballet version of Estancia by Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916 83) – make strong claims on one’s attention but are best taken in separately. Their similarities, oddly enough, can mask their respective strengths.

Though not formally titled a concerto, the tuneful Fandango in three movements – ‘Folia Tropical’, ‘Plegaria (Chaconne)’ and ‘Fandanguito’ – often behaves like one with a soloist entrance suggesting Bruch’s First Violin Concerto and lots of technical fireworks to which Anne Akiko Meyers brings plenty of flash but also expressive depths. What a great violinist she is. Still, the final pages of this medium-weight feel-good piece show the composer running out of developmental ideas for his often charming lyrical and rhythmical ideas. Those who love Márquez’s popular Danzón No 2 will perhaps find no new techniques filling out the three-times-as-long Fandango, with thematic material developed in escalating sequences, reiterated 30 or more times. One would still welcome the piece on a concert programme surrounded by distant musical cousins, but once Ginastera’s Estancia kicks in with its more muscular but also repetitive motifs, one could falsely assume the recording is more of the same. It’s not. Ginastera’s ballet has strong narrative drive behind the repetition, encompassing a rich world worthy of Stravinsky. Realising that, Márquez suffers in comparison.

Estancia tells the story of gauchos living in the Argentinian grasslands, the composer inspired by ‘its limitless immensity and by the transformation that the countryside undergoes in the course of a day’. Still, Ginastera’s viewpoint was much less romanticised than Copland’s Billy the Kid, and with integrated dance and voice not unlike Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Five blocks of text are drawn from the epic poem ‘El gaucho Martín Fierro’ by José Hernández (1834 66), intoned by baritone Gustavo Castillo with hyper-emotional stylisation, but heard also in vocal interludes with a healthy balance of lyricism and rhetoric. It is always dramatically apt. The music’s variety is dazzling, from the ‘Wheat Dance’ with its expansive lyricism punctuated by trios of gracefully ascending fifths in the piano, to fugal activity during the ‘Townfolk’ movement with feats of melodic and rhythmic counterpoint. The picturesque qualities are arresting, the nocturnal music having little sense of peace and resolution amid the many unknown forces that are in the air.

Though most often heard in a concert suite of dances, the 35-minute Estancia demands to be heard in full, this recording being only the second that I know of in recent decades. Of course the music benefits from the Dudamel/LA Philharmonic charisma, but the graphically alluring packaging is a significant let-down. The individual Ginastera movements are printed only in Spanish and texts are absent completely. The other recording, a quite worthy outing with the London Symphony Orchestra under Gisèle Ben-Dor from 1997, also lacks the texts in the current issue, though Spanish and English versions can be accessed online. That release also has Ginastera’s Panambí, an earlier ballet that’s more musically pastoral than Estancia and is one of the most evolved, impressive Op 1 pieces out there.