Southwest Chamber Music

Southwest Chamber Music
Origin	Los Angeles County, California
Genres	Contemporary classical
Occupation(s)	Chamber ensemble
Years active	1987–present
Labels	Cambria Master Recordings, distributed by Naxos
Website	www.swmusic.org

Southwest Chamber Music is a chamber music ensemble based in Los Angeles County, California. The organization was founded in 1987 by the artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt and the executive director Jan Karlin. One of the most active chamber music ensembles in the United States, the ensemble performs year round, provides educational programs, tours internationally, and has recorded 30 compact discs.

Southwest Chamber Music is an innovative and influential cultural force in Southern California, providing concert and educational programming that combines traditional European classics, contemporary work by diverse American composers and modern music from Latin America and Asia. It presents a fall/winter/spring concert series in Los Angeles and Pasadena and, in the summer, the popular Summer Festival at The Huntington in San Marino, California. It also produces the biennial LA International New Music Festival.

Highlights during the past 27 seasons include numerous world and local premieres each season, collaborative Los Angeles festivals (Radical PAST, Universe), cycles of the complete string quartets and complete piano sonatas of Beethoven, presentation of all of the chamber music by the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez in Los Angeles and Mexico City, a three-year centennial celebration of the Los Angeles-born composer John Cage, and performances of the Los Angeles-composed chamber music of Arnold Schoenberg at Cooper Union in New York City and at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, Austria.

The ensemble has made 30 critically acclaimed recordings for which it has also received two Grammy Awards and nine nominations, including its most recent nomination for a 2012 Latin Grammy.

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