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SEQUENZA21/
340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019

Zookeeper:   
Jerry Bowles
(212) 582-3791

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David Salvage

Contributing Editors:

Galen H. Brown
Evan Johnson
Ian Moss
Lanier Sammons
Deborah Kravetz
(Philadelphia)
Eric C. Reda
(Chicago)
Christian Hertzog
(San Diego)
Jerry Zinser
(Los Angeles)

Web & Wiki Master:
Jeff Harrington


Latest Posts

We'll Meet Again, Don't Know Where, Don't Know When
640/1240 Conolrad
Is Classical Music Too Fast?
Dr. Atomic Countdown - T Minus 5
Last Night in L.A. - Hooray for Bollywood
Evan Johnson On the Record: At the Exactest Point
Adolphe and Katrina
Blink
Philadelphia Sounds: Orchestra 2001 Does Dun and Crumb
Metaphysical Musings in San Francisco


 

Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for review. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019


Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Last Night in L.A. - Channeling Carlos Ch�vez

The Southwest Chamber Music ensemble offers our favorite music in the summer, with four Sunday evening concerts outdoors at the Huntington, adjacent to the gardens in San Marino. During the season they offer concerts at the Norton Simon in Pasadena and at Zipper Hall in the Colburn School downtown, across the street from the Disney, where the acoustics are among the best for small venues around the city.

One of their objectives is to record all of the chamber music written by Carlos Ch�vez, and their first two CDs in the series received consecutive Grammy awards. Last night was the first of two concerts continuing their presentation of this music.

Ch�vez lived in two worlds, physically and musically. Last night�s selection of chamber music comprised works firmly in styles of international modernism, not musical nationalism. The earliest works on the program, the three Sonatinas (for piano, piano and cello, piano and violin) were written at the request of his friend Copland and premiered in 1928 at the first of the famous Copland-Sessions concerts presenting classical modernism to New York.

The most unusual work on the concert was his �Trio for Flute, Viola, & Harp�, commissioned for a Philadelphian in 1940. The four-movement work is an orchestration of two songs of de Falla surrounded by two piano pieces by Debussy, ending with �Golliwog�s Cakewalk�. It�s a strange trifle, with its own charm. The evening ended with more distinctive and substantial work. �Variations for Piano and Violin� was commissioned for the first performance of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1969. �Three Spirals for Violin and Piano� was premiered at a 1937 Town Hall concert by Joseph Szigeti and Chavez at the piano.

The concert closed with his second string quartet, a work for violin, viola, cello, and double bass; is there any other string quartet with this instrumentation? It was hard for my ears to get adjusted to the sound; at first it sounded as if someone had over-amplified the bass in a sound system. But the work rapidly claims acceptance of its approach, largely because Ch�vez used the bass as a melodic equal to the violin rather than as the mere bass note in a chord.

 



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