Carlos Chávez: Complete Chamber Works, Vol. 3, is the third installment in Southwest Chamber Music's traversal of the complete chamber music of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. This volume focuses on the part of his chamber music that incorporates percussion in a significant way, and presses into service the percussion ensemble Tambuco, a group that takes its name from the title of a Chávez percussion piece. Tambuco has recorded Chávez's Xochipili, Tambuco and Toccata for Percussion before for the now defunct Dorian label, but all the recordings on this Cambria disc are new. The second time around represents an improvement in all three cases, as these are much sharper and focused performances than the previous ones, in addition to being in better sound.
There are a couple of vocal works here, being Cuatro Melodías Tradicionales and Lamentaciónes sung by mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmán and Tres Exágonos and Otros Tres Exágonos as performed by soprano Alba Quezada. Guzmán is a Los Angeles-based opera singer renowned for her portrayal of Carmen, and her voice may seem a little heavy in these spindly settings. Nonetheless, the vocal quality employed by Guzmán is in keeping with the type of singer that Chávez would have heard performing these pieces were they new. By comparison, Quezada, a singing actress, brings the right balance of voice, ensemble, and characterization together in Chávez's two sets of Exágonos. Conductor Jeff von der Schmidt delivers appropriately tart and taut readings of Chávez's Cantos de México and the first-ever recording of Antígona, incidental music written for Jean Cocteau's Antigone that was eventually revised into Chávez's oft-recorded Sinfonia de Antígona.
The real surprise here, though, is the Partita for Solo Timpani, a late work that shows Chávez's mastery of percussion to its best advantage, expertly played by Ricardo Gallardo of Tambuco. The sound quality of Carlos Chávez: Complete Chamber Works, Vol. 3, is terrific, and one need not go farther than here to experience the best-ever recordings of such Chávez staples as Xochipili and Toccata for Percussion. The first two discs in this series both won Grammy awards; in this case, the third time might again prove a charm, as unusual as that would be.
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