Biography (read more)
Alberto Ginastera was an Argentine composer of the twentieth century, born in Buenos Aires to a Spanish father and an Italian mother. He studied and taught in Buenos Aires, spent 1945–47 in the United States studying with Aaron Copland, and settled in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1970 until his death. His output spans orchestral works, ballets, operas, concertos for piano, violin, cello, and harp, chamber music, and piano sonatas, often drawing on Argentine folk and gauchesco traditions across three broad stylistic periods he termed Objective Nationalism, Subjective Nationalism, and Neo-Expressionism. He died in Geneva in 1983.
Ginastera is regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century composers of the Americas, his fusion of Argentine folk idioms with modernist and avant-garde techniques having shaped a distinctly national concert tradition. He was an influential teacher whose students included Ástor Piazzolla, and his concertos and ballets remain staples of Latin American repertoire performed by orchestras worldwide.
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