Bard SummerScape Presents
Carlos Chávez and His World
Friday, August 7, 2015 – Sunday, August 9, 2015
The 26th Annual Season
In its 26th season, the Bard Music Festival turns, for the first time, to Latin America. The focal point is Carlos Chávez (1899–1978), the central figure in Mexican music of the 20th century. Chávez was a tireless organizer, generous colleague, and the most eminent of Latin American modernist composers. His synthesis of markers of Mexican identity with modernism led Aaron Copland to praise him as “one of the first authentic signs of a New World with its own new music.”
Chávez’s career took to him to Europe and then to the United States, where he met and became friends with Aaron Copland and Edgard Varèse. His music incorporated emblems of modernity but was also among the first to reference Mexico’s indigenous past. Indeed, for a handful of major pieces, such as Sinfonía india (1935), Los cuatro soles (1925), and Xochipilli (1940), Chávez found inspiration and strength in Mexican themes. He played a crucial role in the celebration of native culture (indigenismo). But his influence was not confined to composition. As a conductor, he promoted works by composers from Mexico, Cuba, Canada, and the United States, including Copland, Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Amadeo Roldán, and gave the first performances in Mexico of music by Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Milhaud, and de Falla. Through his work as a governmental arts administrator and founder of several major cultural institutions in Mexico, among them the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Chávez brought international visibility to Mexican musical and cultural life.
Chávez’s career offers the festival an opportunity to look at a vibrant cultural period in Mexico and Latin America. His life encompassed the Mexican Revolution, which was followed by a period of cultural renaissance in literature, film, the visual arts, and music, providing rich material for a reassessment of that country’s history and of U.S.–Mexican relations. Chávez was politically engaged, and in the 1930s, beginning with the Spanish Civil War, helped integrate European refugees from fascism into Mexican society. The 2015 Bard Music Festival will showcase masterworks by Chávez and his contemporaries. Program themes will include the relationship of the Latin American musical scene to that in the United States; the role of the European emigrés; the legacy and influence of Spain; Mexican musical traditions; and Chávez’s work as conductor and his place among the outstanding Latin composers of the 20th century. The work of Silvestre Revueltas, Alberto Ginastera, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and others will be heard, as will choral music from Mexico dating back to the 16th century.
Bard Music Festival weekends include orchestral concerts by the American Symphony Orchestra, chamber and choral music performances, panel discussions, and special events.
For more information, call 845-758-7900, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/.
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