To fulfill a commission from the National Institute of Culture and Fine Arts of Venezuela for a work to be premiered by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra at a 1966 festival in Caracas, Ginastera simply expanded much of his 1958 String Quartet No. 2. He jettisoned the first of the quartet's five movements, shuffled the others, beefed up the instrumentation, and, in places, composed additional passages. The quartet had been Ginastera's first entirely serial work, but its powerful rhythms and melodic contours tied it closely to Argentine folk dance and song. This is more apparent in the raw, direct four-instrument version; the string-orchestra expansion seems a bit more distant and abstract.

The concerto's first movement, "Variazioni per i solisti," is derived from the quartet's second slow movement, Libero e rapsodico. Here it is a rhapsodic set of variations for the principals in each section, including double bass, with occasional support from the rest of the string body. In the manner of Ginastera's earlier Variaciones concertantes, each solo is really a challenging mini-cadenza. The theme itself is meditative and nocturnal, and very few of the variations change its character at all.

Scherzo fantastico (the quartet's Presto magico), fast and feverish, makes free use of advanced techniques and sounds, with scratching col legno, splashing sul ponticello, and buzzing harmonics added to the more conventional pricks of pizzicato. The result, which also briefly employs aleatorics that look forward to Ginastera's Glosses on Themes of Pablo Casals, is more a study in timbre and effect than a development of themes.

The Adagio angoscioso is, as the title suggests, an anguished threnody, more densely scored than anything so far in the piece. The long, harmonically lost theme wanders through a sequence of transformations that create a gradual climax that falls off suddenly midway through the movement, making way for a slow, desolate fade-out.

The frenzied Finale furioso is Bartókian in its snap and intensity. It's as if the spirit of the conclusion of the Hungarian's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta had transmigrated into an Argentine gaucho dancing a malambo.

© James Reel, All Music Guide