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aCarlos Chavez is Mexico's No.1 man of music and one of the world's important composers. In 20 stormy years on the podium of his country's first major symphony orchestra, he introduced Mexico to as much Bach as Stravinsky-and almost as much Chavez. As a young composer he tilted with everything from mechanized music, in his ballet H.P. (horsepower), to severe abstractions, with such names as Polygons and Hexagons, to music for native instruments. Last week Composer Chavez led the New York PhilharmonicSymphony Orchestra in the first U.S. performance of his Sinfonia No. j, which proved to be bluntly modern, enormously powerful and sometimes beautiful.

Chavez conducted the big orchestra with broad-backed, muscular energy ("An orchestra is heavy on the wrists," he sighed, "like a man driving a huge span of horses attached to a heavy coach"). The music began with portentous thunder, answered by a piping call on the piccolo clarinet and a burbling of other woodwinds. Twice the movement plodded ponderously up harmonic mountains -and, triumphantly, gave glimpses of wide vistas on the other side. The second movement went along at a dashing, rustic gallop, while the third strutted with the bravado of a teen-ager unaware of being observed. Some of the loveliest music came when the high clarinet played a melting melody while the bass clarinet throbbed, followed by a slam-bang finale.

The work was commissioned by U.S. Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce in memory of her daughter Ann Brokaw, who died in an automobile accident in 1944, at 19. Composer Chavez took three years to finish the score, although he thought of all the themes in one day.

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