Alberto Ginastera’s dazzling Glosses on Themes of Pablo Casals, heard here in both its original version for string quartet and string orchestra and its later fully-orchestrated version, pays tribute to his close friend, the legendary cellist (and composer) on the occasion of the centenary of Casals’s birth.

The Variaciones concertantes places a variety of instruments in the limelight with featured solos, culminating in a virtuosic malambo, the archetypical gaucho ‘jousting’ dance whose vertiginous motion engenders frenetic enthusiasm among both participants and onlookers.