Recording Review

Carlos Chávez. Complete Chamber Music, Volume 3. Southwest Chamber music. Tambuco. Carlos Chávez. Xochipilli, an Imaginary Aztec Music. Toccata for Percussion. Cuatro Melodías Tradicionales. Tambuco for Percussion. Lamentaci„nes. Cantos de México. Antígona, apuntes para la sinfonía. Tres Exágonos. Partita for Solo Timpani. Tambuco percussion ensemble. Ricardo Gallardo, solo timpani. Jeff von der schmidt, conductor. Suzanna Guzán, mezzo soprano. Alba Quezada, soprano. Liner notes by Jeff von der Schmidt. 2005. Cambria master recordings. Cambria CD 8852.

Precipice: Modern Marimba. Nathaniel Bartlett. Philip Glass: Opening. Allan Schindler: Precipice. Greg Wilder: Interlude. Augusta read Thomas: Silhouettes. Steve Reich: Vermont Counterpoint. Liner notes by Nathaniel Bartlett. 2006. Albany Records. Troy 855.

When the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez arrived in Manhattan for a performance of his Sinfonía de Antígona (1933) with the New York philharmonic in February of 1937, he stepped into the midst of an explosion of new American music. Edgard Varúse, godfather-elect of the new American modernism, had completed Ionisation, his noisy masterpiece for thirteen percussionists, earlier that decade. And, on the West Coast, upstarts like John Cage, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison were busy upsetting staid classical apple carts in their own unique and cacophonous ways. Chávez was ready to join the fray. Although his own musical language was as prescient and modern as that of his northern counterparts, critical accounts in the American press highlighted his folkloric angle, assessing him as a "smart mestizo," and praising his evocative music for its sounds of "swishing gourds and shrill clay pipes." Indeed, only a very few North Americans in the intervening seventy years have managed to look beyond the Chávez of Yaqui Indian melodies and Aztec iconography to embrace him as a composer of complexity—one who navigated the turbulent crosscurrents of his time just as Cage and Varúse did. His need to be a composer firmly of a place (and what a place!) and, just as firmly, to be rooted in the place-less formalism of his time, meant that no singular, uninflected view of him would satisfy.