The 90th anniversary of the birth of the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera, who died in 1983, is as good a reason as any to mount a festival of his music. With the pianist Alberto Portugheis as artistic director, the Ginastera festival runs throughout 2006, with programmes scattered around the capital and an emphasis on his chamber and instrumental works. ENO staged the second of Ginastera's three operas, Bomarzo, in the 1970s, but many of his most important works remain little known here, and his achievement in blending modernist influences with elements from Argentinian music into his own distinctive style remains underappreciated.

The Wigmore Hall recital by Portugheis and the Spanish Assai Quartet included two of Ginastera's most important chamber scores. In the first of his three string quartets, from 1948, Ginastera is still assimilating the lessons of modernism in general and that of Bartok in particular; it's a work high on energy but lacking in memorable ideas, with folksy elements introduced almost apologetically. In the Piano Quintet of 15 years later, Ginastera is in charge of his material, and the four short movements connected by cadenzas for pairs of string instruments and the piano make a satisfying structure even if the invention runs out of steam towards the end.

The accomplished Assai Quartet played both pieces for all they were worth, giving a sense of purpose to Ginastera's most grandly rhetorical writing. They also joined forces with Portugheis for a piece by Piazzolla, who studied with Ginastera in the early 1950s, though the unattributed piano-quintet arrangement of his suite Four Seasons of Buenos Aires was unconvincing. The First Quartet by Ernesto Halffter (1905-1989), was a real discovery; composed when Halffter was 18, it combines the suavity of Ravel's chamber music with flavours from Stravinsky's Three Pieces for string quartet and his Pulcinella with a lightness of touch that is totally engaging.