Santiago Rodriguez, a prize-winner at the 1981 Van Cliburn competition, has a formidable octave technique and any amount of vehement attack—qualities much in demand in the main Ginastera works here—but can also produce a lovely singing tone (as in the Falla transcription), and is limpid and thoughtful in the two pieces Albeniz pieces (though the Serenade may be thought somewhat over-romanticized). He has been vividly, but very closely, recorded; and this disc is useful in adding to Ginastera's present meagre representation in the catalogues and making his style better known. Already in the three Danzas argentinas of 1937 (his first published work) his fondness for Bartokian percussiveness is conspicuous (as well as a polytonal employment of black-note and white-note keys in the outer dances), but very striking also is the sense of bleak loneliness—characteristic both of the wide pampas and the high andes of his native country—exuded by the second dance.
Ginastera's First Sonata of 1952 is his most important work for solo piano, brief (14 minutes) as it is: the vigorous thrust of the first movement's busy syncopations, the eeriness of the fleeting scherzo and the intensity of the freely dodecaphonic Adagio are, however, more interesting than the pounding rhythm of the final malambo. The Second sonata of nearly 30 years later is less successful, with violent dissonant hammering carried to excess; but its central movement, which begins in allegedly pre-Colombian style—oddly reminiscent of Stravinsky's Les noces—is intriguing.
Excellent as are Rodriguez's performances in the main, several reservations have to be voiced about this issue. His ''Andaluza'' is needlessly convulsive in rhythm—compare Larrocha's fine reading on Decca (CD 417 639-2DH, 6/87)—and why that unconvincing staccato in the latter half of the middle section, all marked legato molto? He takes the homage to Morillo at such a breakneck speed—even faster than that marked—that it becomes a meaningless blur, and he tenaciously prolongs what should be its final short sharp stab; and in the Rondo he surprisingly misreads four left-hand chords (bars 14-16) as being in the bass clef instead of the treble. Other flaws concern the production. Fifteen bars from the end of the Adagio of the First Sonata what sounds like an edit elides the resolution of a bass D flat to C. Several of the individual timings shown are inaccurate; the sleeve-note writer (who confines herself solely to the Ginastera items) attributes the tone-row to the wrong movement of the First Sonata; and if she really tunes a guitar to the first six notes of its Adagio instead of to those eight bars before the end of the previous movement, she must be quite exceptionally idiosyncratic.'