Panambi, a ballet on a supernatural legend of the Guarani Indians, was the first work that Ginastera acknowledged (dismissing earlier efforts), and it made the 21-year-old’s name, immediately winning a well-merited national prize and stimulating the choreographer Lincoln Kirstein to commission another ballet (Estancia) from him. (His ballet company folded, however, before the work could be produced.) The theme in this case was a day on a ranch, with the traditional figure of the gaucho as its focus. Recordings of extracts from Estancia, and the concert suite from Panambi, have been available, but here for the first time are the complete ballets (though the Uruguayan-born conductor confesses that in the latter she has, from preference, employed the suite version of the relevant movements).
With typical youthful abandon, Ginastera demanded a huge orchestra (including quadruple woodwind, piano, celesta and two harps, besides masses of percussion with no fewer than three bass-drums) for Panambi, but used it with a remarkably imaginative sense of elaborately exotic colour – as the introductory movement at once reveals. Stylistically the music ranges from the primitive violence of the ‘Warriors’ dance’ (whose timing is wrongly shown as ten minutes too long!) and the Sacre-influenced ‘Invocation to the spirits of power’ to the scintillating brilliance of ‘The water sprites’ and to a luscious lyricism that offers opportunities to several orchestral soloists. The ‘Dawn’ finale is worthy to stand beside Ravel’s.
Estancia calls for a normal-size orchestra (though again with a large percussion contingent) but is no less vigorous: gaucho existence is clearly extremely macho. It is a score of heady excitement (as in the frenetic final ‘Malambo’), with occasional lyrical sections like ‘Afternoon’ and ‘Twilight idyll’, but in general it is rather less inventive, relying perhaps overmuch on repetitive patterns (as in the ‘Rodeo’). Luis Gaeta is a histrionic narrator but a firm-voiced singer. Strikingly virtuosic playing throughout by the LSO, and spectacular recording quality, add up to a whole-hearted recommendation of the disc.'