Una carta is a portrait of the Uruguayan composer Coriún Aharonián, with eight chamber works from 1968 to 2006 played by the Freiburg Ensemble Aventure and the orchestral piece Mestizo (1993) in a radio recording. His music is made of bold gestures and explosive confrontations, rooted in the culture of Latin American political resistance. It follows the ensemble's earlier Wergo portrait of Graciela Paraskevaídis, his wife.

Aharonián was born in Montevideo in 1940, the son of Armenian immigrants who had survived the genocide of 1915, and died there on 8 October 2017, aged 77. He was a composer, musicologist and teacher. With Héctor Tosar he founded the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea, which carried on the work of a Latin American centre for advanced musical studies closed in 1971. He took part in founding the Núcleo Música Nueva in 1966 and, in 1971, the record label Ayuí/Tacuabé. He was also active in the resistance to the dictatorships of the region. The chamber recordings are a coproduction with Deutschlandradio, and Mestizo is played by the SWF-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden under Zoltán Peskó.

The scoring is often unusual. Gente (1990) adds marimbula and steel drum to winds, brass and double bass, and Música para cinco (1972) sets alto flute, horn, trumpet and trombone against tom-toms. Música para tres (1968), for flute, violin and piano, is the earliest work, and ¿Y ahora? (1984) is a piano piece of under three minutes. ¿De qué estamos hablando? (2006) gathers the low sounds of bass clarinet, bassoon and cello. The title work, Una carta (2001) for fifteen instrumentalists, is the longest of the chamber pieces at about twelve minutes.

Schott sums up his aesthetic as something that can be found in a nutshell: short sequences in a narrow range, rigorous use of material and sharp sound gestures. To these it adds explosive dramatic densifications, strict rhythmic organisation, block-like static constructions and repetition joined to motivic transformation, with silence full of suspense used as an aesthetic resource. Schott also stresses the music's non-discursive character, which avoids development in the classical sense.

CD, Wergo WER 7374 2, released in 2019, in Wergo's series of Ensemble Aventure recordings, with the support of the Fundación Música AntiquaNova.