In a development that promises to be as enlightening as it is mildly disorienting, a drive north this weekend will lead you “south of the border.”

Carlos Chávez (1899-1978), regarded by many as Mexico’s foremost composer and conductor, will be the focus of this year’s Bard Music Festival, which begins today at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

For the next two weeks, Bard will bring together crackerjack artists (an impressive number of them on the Bard Conservatory faculty), leading musicologists, and appreciative audiences to celebrate music of the Americas, with an unusual focus on underplayed music of Mexico and South America.

Among the featured performers will be Princeton University’s ensemble-in-residence, So Percussion, which will appear on a concert of music by Chávez, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Amadeo Roldán, and Colin McPhee, on August 14.

Chávez is a fascinating figure, whose influence cannot be underestimated. His own works are divided between nationalistic utterances, pitched to the people, and more cosmopolitan, modernist experiments. His most famous bit of populism is his Symphony No. 2, the “Sinfonia India,” based on melodies by indigenous tribes of northern Mexico. The piece will be heard at Bard on August 15, alongside works by Latin American powerhouses Heitor Villa-Lobos, Silvestre Revueltas, and José Pablo Moncayo.

In 1937, Chávez conducted the world premiere of Aaron Copland’s “El Salón México,” which essentially launched Copland into the mainstream.

As always with the Bard festival, a tie-in book of scholarly essays, “Carlos Chávez and His World,” is being issued by Princeton University Press.

Read more about this amazing, total immersion in the composer’s life and work in my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2015/08/bard_music_festival_focuses_on.html