Initiating a new series of recordings around the genre of the Sonatina with the Mexican Modernist master Carlos Chávez and his blending of both the European idiom and ideas surrounding miniature form and lightness of style with its opposite, what we may characterize as a culturally informed and politically fueled desire to craft and manifest the musical language of his native México articulated in its fullest expression and power.
The melancholic traces of this cultural heritage that Chávez honors are born out in a harmonic language that bears resemblance to Hungarian composer Béla Bartók's hyperfocus on the folk music of his own nation, but with the refinement of resolution that he must have learned from his teacher, the renowned Manuel Ponce.
In the fourth of his Norton lectures of 1958–59, titled "Repetition in Music", he described a mode of composition already observable in many of his compositions since the 1920s, in which "The idea of repetition and variation can be replaced by the notion of constant rebirth, of true derivation: a stream that never comes back to its source; a stream in eternal development, like a spiral ..."
Sonatina Series • 1
Carlos Chávez(1899-1978)
Sonatina
1925
Performed Live by
Gavin Gamboa
Teatro Ángela Peralta
Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico
2015 December 8
Artwork
Ted Nava
View Carlos Chávez ⎮ Sonatina in the digital garden.