The Miró Quartet Serves Up a Triple Helping of Ginastera

By Brian Wise | From the July/August 2025 issue of Strings

For a string quartet in the market for a canonic 20th-century work to balance out a concert program, choices usually boil down to a select few: one of Bartók’s six quartets, one of Shostakovich’s 15, or the single quartets by Debussy and Ravel. An intrepid ensemble might also turn to music by Schoenberg, Berg, or Glass.

But as the Miró Quartet approached its 30th anniversary in 2025, it all had the ring of “been there, done that.” The group instead found a substantial choice in the three string quartets of Alberto Ginastera, who, alongside the utterly different Astor Piazzolla, was the most important Argentine composer of the 20th century. And having launched its career with a winning rendition of Ginastera’s String Quartet No. 2 at the Banff Competition in 1998, the quartet—
with a current lineup of violinists Daniel Ching and William Fedkenheuer, violist John Largess, and cellist Joshua Gindele—has now released the complete trilogy on the Pentatone label.

“Like the Beethoven quartets, you can hear a continuity of his voice and a development of certain elements,” says Largess. “The first quartet is very 1940s and ’50s—a little like Copland, but with a Latin twist. The second quartet is very dramatic and, for me, kind of a mix of both Bartók and Schoenberg. Again, with a lot of Latin twists. He’s very specific about bringing dance elements and gaucho elements to these, especially the malambo, which is one of the traditional Argentinian folk dances.”

With the third string quartet, Ginastera brings a singer into the fold to intone settings of Spanish-language poets (Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, and Rafael Alberti) addressing love, eternity, and tragedy. The soprano Kiera Duffy joins the Miró on the recording. “The third was a little bit more gnarly to grapple with, honestly, so we didn’t tackle that until maybe ten years ago,” says first violinist Ching. “Like Bartók, like Beethoven, Ginastera wrote throughout his life so [the cycle] really traces the three compositional periods in his life.”    

A Three-Decade Connection

Ginastera’s career arc mirrors that of Bartók in that his early works are direct and folkloristic. They include the String Quartet No. 1 (1948) and his ballets Panambi and Estancia. By the time of the second quartet, ten years later, Ginastera had entered what he called his “neo-expressionistic period,” as he incorporated 12-tone techniques and microtonal effects. The 1973 Quartet No. 3 is a fusion of song cycle and instrumental tone poem that builds to moments of knotty intensity. The composer favored movement titles such as Presto Magico and Fantastico.

“He loves the images of the gauchos on the pampas underneath the night sky,” says Largess, who is easily the Miró’s most loquacious member in a group video call. “He loves these images of the jungle and nighttime and something magical and mystical. He uses the word ‘hallucinogenic’ a lot in his own writings. There’s an element of South America being special—a magical realism element that you see in literature creeping into these pieces.”

The Miró’s relationship with Ginastera is almost as old as the quartet itself. The founding members were Oberlin Conservatory students when they heard the Vermeer Quartet play the composer’s Quartet No. 2 at a festival. After winning first prize at Banff, the Miró apprenticed as teaching assistants with the Juilliard Quartet, which had premiered Ginastera’s second and third quartets.

“The Juilliard Quartet was very much key in bringing these pieces into the New York scene in the ’70s and ’80s, so I sort of got that indirectly from them,” says Largess. The Miró, he adds, has embraced Robert Mann’s maxim, “to make contemporary music sound traditional and familiar and make the traditional music sound contemporary and shocking.”

While Latin American composers have often been overlooked by mainstream concert presenters, their visibility has grown in recent years. “We are in a very heavily Latin-influenced community,” acknowledges cellist Gindele, referring to the quartet’s 22-year residency at the University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music. (Its former students include the roots-classical quartet Invoke and the Thalea String Quartet.) 

“We have a lot of Latin music teaching and history and methodology here at the University of Texas. So I think there’s also something that feels like home to his music. The Latin influences are very strong in the writing.”

Ginastera himself came to the US in the mid-1940s on a Guggenheim fellowship, and in later visits, lectured at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the Miró periodically performs. “It’s surprising how many places in America we’ve played that Ginastera himself visited,” notes second violinist Fedkenheuer. He adds, “It just feels really great to play. For our quartet, we can sink our teeth into it and wrestle it around. There are a lot of raw emotions that we can get out.”

When the Miró performed the Ginastera cycle at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for the composer’s centennial in 2016, it was only the second time that one of his quartets had been presented in the series. Asked New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, “How can this stunning piece not have become a staple of the repertory?” During the recording sessions last December, the foursome say they uncovered countless nuances in Ginastera’s writing.

“He’s very much a melting-pot influence, being representative of Argentinian music, but also having an Italian background,” says Ching. “There are definitely Ravel- and Debussy-like passages in some of the quartets.” In Ginastera’s first quartet, you might hear traces of the pizzicato-laced Scherzo of Ravel’s String Quartet. The fourth movement sounds as if Bartók had lugged his recording equipment to an Argentine gaucho bar rather than a Transylvanian village.

And it would appear that, for the Mirós, time has led to a deeper and more fluent relationship with Ginastera’s music. The idiom felt easier this time around, says Largess. “Even going to the studio,” he says, “I felt a lot more confident in my ability to execute everything that was on the page, now, and I’m not sure I would have felt that way before. Maybe I was more athletic as a player when I was younger. But it didn’t seem to be an issue: I felt more comfortable and understood what I needed to do a lot better.”

The album is the latest of several made at the studios of KMFA, Austin’s classical music station. George Preston, the station’s chief executive officer, says that the Miró feeds off the richness of Austin’s music scene, with its indie rock, jazz, mariachi, country, and western swing strands—“all the people you’ll see on Austin City Limits.”

“They’re absolutely a top-shelf quartet,” Preston adds. “And in the grand scheme of the lifespan of a quartet, they’re still pretty young.”  

Ohio Roots  

The Miró Quartet was formed in 1995, with Gindele and Ching among the founding members. Largess joined in 1997, and Fedkenheuer in 2011, replacing Sandy Yamamoto (who is married to Ching). Along with Banff, the early ensemble won prizes at the Coleman, Fischoff, and Naumburg competitions.

The relative stability of the Miró per-
sonnel is hard won. “In the early years, we spent a lot of time communicating, talking about how to speak and listen to each other, how to have healthy relationships, how to find balance,” says Largess. “I remember my first summer with the quartet, in 1997 in Aspen, we spent about as much time talking about how to rehearse healthily as we did rehearse.”

The quartet continues to focus on interpersonal matters at its regular three-hour rehearsals. There is also much to prepare, with a schedule of some 60 concerts over the past season, along with unlisted fundraisers and house concerts. The Miró repertoire continues to evolve. It has always included a healthy interest in Schubert and Beethoven, with the latter being the focus of a recorded cycle in 2019. But consult its discography and you will find contemporary composers from George Crumb and Gunther Schuller to Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw, the latter two featured on the quartet’s Grammy-nominated 2024 release, Home.

For its next recording, due out this autumn, the Miró will focus on holiday songs, arranged by 15 composers including Puts, Anna Clyne, Gabriel Kahane, Clarice Assad, Michi Wiancko, and Reena Esmail. The breadth of names could perhaps only be assembled by a quartet that sits at or near the top of a crowded field. Ching says he and his colleagues avoid chasing fads. “I think all of us are really sinking our teeth into just being authentic with our voices,” he says. “Every quartet has its own stamp in what repertoire it pursues and what composers they are commissioning it from.”

Largess stresses the positives of a 30-year history, whether it involves learning new works or revisiting old favorites. “I just feel we have a deeper knowledge of the things we’ve spent time on,” he says. “When we learn a brand-new composer or a new piece, there’s a different level of experience with each other. That just makes the learning process get deeper faster. I feel more and more rewarded working with these three because the relationship and trust we’ve worked on only grows from year to year.”