If an American festival of Mexican music were organized as a popularity contest, then the winner would certainly be Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940), whose orchestral works “Sensemayá” and “La Noche de los Mayas” have been standard repertory for decades. Leon Botstein, however, has sensibly decided to name the next Bard Music Festival, at Bard College (Aug. 7-9 and Aug. 13-16), in honor of another composer: “Carlos Chávez and His World.” Audiences love Revueltas’s passionate lyricism, Technicolor orchestration, and spicy evocations of popular mestizo music, while Chávez’s brand of modernism is more severe and self-contained, like an Aztec temple. But twentieth-century Mexico was indeed Chávez’s world; Revueltas just lived in it.
Chávez (1899-1978) was indisputably the most powerful Mexican artistic figure, musical or otherwise, of his time, an era that stretched from the modernizing but repressive dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, through the bloody revolution and the socialist-oriented nineteen-twenties and thirties, and into a new kind of conservatism that allied Mexico to the Cold War policies of the United States. Chávez was a natural politician; his successful establishment of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, in 1928, was followed, among other triumphs, by his role in designing and leading the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, in 1947. (Imagine if the top job at the National Endowment for the Arts came with sweeping powers, enormous prestige, and a lot more money.) His tyrannical will governed the destinies of music schools, museums, and dance and theatre companies, advancing new projects while consolidating the country’s heritage. (The lavish illustrations in the program book testify to his collaborations with such artists as Paul Strand, Rufino Tamayo, and Diego Rivera.)
Chávez’s music is national in spirit but proudly experimental in content. Chávez pieces adorn nearly every festival program; audiences can hear him paying tribute to the pre-Columbian world (“Xochipili: An Imaginary Aztec Music,” from 1940), making a rigorous adaptation of diatonic neoclassicism (the Ten Preludes, for piano, from 1937), matching the American academic modernists in recondite complexity (in the “Five Caprichos,” written in 1975), or facing down the entire Romantic piano repertory (the Piano Concerto, a work of overwhelming, granitic power, from 1938-40).
Although neither “Sensemayá” nor “Noches” will be performed at Bard, the festival’s eleven programs will feature such Revueltas works as the keening film score “Redes” (“The Wave”) and the joyful String Quartet No. 4, “Música de Feria,” in addition to pieces by Manuel M. Ponce (the tangy “Concierto del Sur”), Blas Galindo, and many other Mexican musicians. Pan-Latin context will be offered in works by such composers as Falla, Ginastera (the ballet suite “Estancia”), and Villa-Lobos; Chávez’s American connections will be highlighted in performances of pieces by Sessions, Cowell, Cage, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and, of course, his close friend Aaron Copland (the Sextet). Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra in Chávez’s most famous piece for orchestra, the “Sinfonía India”—a vividly persuasive work once championed by Leonard Bernstein—on Aug. 15. ♦
