Estancia

Ginastera attained global renown with Estancia, a vivid portrait of the vast rural landscapes of his native Argentina and starring the tough but downtrodden gaucho. Estancia was a commission in 1941 from Lincoln Kirstein’s American Ballet Caravan (with projected choreography by George Balanchine), but the company disbanded before it could be produced. Undeterred, Ginastera repurposed his music as a four-movement orchestral suite in 1943, and nine years later saw the full ballet produced by the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. In keeping with Kirstein’s original concept, the ballet is set on an estancia, a farm or cattle ranch located in the grassy Argentine Pampas. Ginastera took inspiration from Martín Fierro (1873), José Hernández’s epic poem about the lives, struggles and solitude of gauchos, or South American cowboys. Ginastera’s plot does not mirror Fierro’s complete journey but rather depicts a day on a ranch while focusing on the tale of a city boy who wins the heart of a country girl by proving his skills as a horseman and dancer. The score is framed by mostly reflective, atmospheric numbers—a morning “Wheat Dance” (“Danza del trigo”), a “Twilight Idyll” (“Idilio Crepuscular”) and a “Nocturno” with a gentle baritone solo—but the central dances are bright and expressionistic. A vigorous horse-taming rodeo (“La Doma”) rumbles along with brass and timpani exclamations, “The Ranch Hands” (“Los Trabajadores Agricolas”) features spiky, syncopated patterns, and the “Final Dance” is one of several based on the foot-stomping rhythms of the malambo, a flamboyant gaucho folk dance.