With Carlos Chávez: Complete Chamber Music, Vol. 1, Los Angeles-based group
Southwest Chamber Music Society initiates a recording project that promises to deliver all of
Carlos Chávez's chamber music on four discs. Once securely considered the alpha and omega of Mexican classical music,
Chávez has lost some of his primacy since his death in 1978. Carlos Chávez: Complete Chamber Music, Vol. 1, helps set the record straight. This initial volume concentrates on a cycle of three multi-movement Inventions dating from 1959 -- 1967, Suite for Double Quartet drawn from the ballet The Daughter of Colchis (later Dark Meadow) commissioned by Martha Graham (1942), and a short trifle for solo oboe, Upingos (1957). Inventions, composed for solo piano (originally for William Masselos), string trio, and solo harp, respectively, are solid, expressive, and exuberantly rhythmic works written within a highly dissonant harmonic language. The piece for solo harp, Invention III, is particularly striking and beautifully played here by
Amy Wilkins. The Graham ballet suite is splendid, and should be required listening for those who know well the other work she commissioned at this time -- Appalachian Spring by
Aaron Copland.
Chávez's Suite for double quartet is more bitter in tone than the famous
Copland work, but there are such points of similarity that it may be said that
Chávez's score represents the other side of
Copland's coin.
Chávez's music is fabulously well played and recorded here; if the future installments in the series are as good as this, enthusiasts of twentieth century American music really have something to look forward to.