2003 GRAMMY® Award Winner: Best Small Ensemble
"This is the fascinating first issue in Southwest's projected four-volume edition of the complete chamber music of Carlos Chávez. The performances are strong and whet the appetite for the remainder of the series."
--Chris Pasles, Los Angeles Times
"Whatever his musical style, harsh or mellifluous, it is the music of a personality, one of the most striking of our time."
--Aaron Copland
"Chávez the composer has always triumphed through integrity, and suffered for it as well. He has never sought to be "fashionable," but has consistently maintained the vigorous personality of his own voice."
--Leonard Bernstein
"In the long run Chávez will probably be more important than Stravinsky."
--Lou Harrison
Southwest Chamber Music and Cambria Master Recordings are proud to announce the release of Volume I of the first complete recording of the chamber music of Carlos Chávez. Read more...
One of the founding fathers of musical life in Mexico, Carlos Chávez (1899-1978) was part of the amazing group of musicians, painters and poets working in the 1920s and 1930s who forged what is today internationally recognized as the Mexican cultural identity. Ironically, the great Mexican composer was not interested in nationalistic music per se; the aesthetic quality was the most important issue in art for Chávez. "What is important is good music. Unless it is good, nationalistic music is worthless. Good music can be created only by good composers…..For a country to have great national music, the only thing missing is the great composers to create it."
Ana Chávez, the composer’s daughter, has graciously given Southwest Chamber Music permission to illustrate these performances and recordings of her father’s music with portraits of Chávez never seen outside of her family. There are two by Diego Rivera (from 1932 and 1946), and one each by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1947) and Rufino Tamayo (undated, but probably from the late 1960s to early 70s). These portrait drawings have not been seen outside of the Chávez family according to Mrs. Chávez, who remembers, for example, Rivera presenting one of these drawings to her father on the occasion of his birthday party in 1946.
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