Image courtesy of John Sann/Deutsche Grammophon
From Stuttgart to New York, Amsterdam, Atlanta, and beyond, few works have seized the classical world in the modern era like the music of the Argentine-born composer Osvaldo Golijov, who has in just over a decade become one of the most important and most sought-after artistic voices of our time.
A sold-out festival spanning two months held at Lincoln Center in 2006, called "The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov," featured multiple performances of his key works as well as his chamber music and other concerts featuring artists and music he loves. The following year, he was named the first-ever composer-in-residence at the Mostly Mozart Festival, and in 2010 has just finished a three-year residency as co-composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, along with Mark-Anthony Turnage. He has also served as composer-in-residence at the Spoleto USA Festival, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Music Alive series, and at the Marlboro, Ravinia, Ojai, Trondheim, and Holland festivals. Loyola Professor of Music at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where he has taught since 1991, he also teaches during the summers at the Sundance Composers Lab at the Sundance Film Festival, and has also taught at Tanglewood and at Carnegie Hall workshops alongside a frequent collaborator and muse, soprano Dawn Upshaw. He has also often worked with such colleagues as Yo-Yo Ma and the Kronos Quartet.
The DG recording of the St. Mark Passion is actually the second one for this piece: the original was made by the German company Hanssler Classic as a live recording of the piece's world premiere. "It's raw and fresh," says Golijov thoughtfully, "but they didn't know what this piece was going to be, or become--and the layers of conversation between the instruments and the singers unfortunately got lost. The Deutsche Grammophon version, by contrast, fulfills my purely sonic wishes--it captures the piece with richness, detail, and focus. Moreover, the inclusion of the DVD gives insight into the theatrical nature of this piece." (The one drawback of the DVD is the failure to include subtitles; while the libretto and translations are given as part of the liner notes, it's very disruptive to the experience to be constantly referring to printed materials.)
Though he has done some small rewriting of the piece over time since the Passion's premiere a decade ago, Golijov argues that the piece's evolution over the past decade is less about any tweaks he's made than in how audiences around the globe perceive it. "I think the greater differences," he says, "are in how it enters the world now, and in how it is performed. The performers' language has expanded, and so has the audience's. Certain artworks have the power to reshuffle how we conceive of the repertory--not that I'm comparing my work to theirs, but think about literature pre- and post-Chekhov, or music pre- and post-writing of the Verdi Requiem."
Whether or not anyone makes those particular parallels, it's worth remembering that critics like Mark Swed at the Los Angeles Times wrote that the world premiere of the piece, which had been commissioned by the International Bach Academy Stuttgart was greeted with a 25-minute "riotous standing ovation from an audience that was whooping and applauding until its hands turned red...modern music history had just been made." One of the many accomplishments of this work is that it reoriented listeners' expectations of what a Passion could be: for an Argentine Jewish composer to create brilliant display that invokes not just the spirit of Bach but also weaves together Jewish tradition, flamenco, Afro-Latin art forms including Argentine tango, Brazilian capoeira, and Cuban són and jazz as well as classical tradition. Moreover, in Golijov's construct, the performers shift between multiple points of view coherently and empathetically, which is in itself a marvel of theatrical narrative play.
"The Verdi Requiem was a real model for me, as were the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers; there's something about the Monteverdi that is close to my Latin sensibilities," says Golijov, who was born and raised in Argentina to a family of Eastern European Jewish background, and who steeped not just in the Western classical canon but in klezmer music and new tango. After studying piano and composition locally, he moved to Israel in 1983 and enrolled at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy, where he worked with composer Mark Kopytman; three years later, he relocated again to the US to earn his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania with George Crumb, and became a fellow at the Tanglewood Institute, where he studied with Oliver Knussen.
"For me, as a Jew, to be invited to write a version of the Christian narrative...well, my first instinct was to say no," says Golijov. "But I eventually realized that it would be a tremendous opportunity to revisit my youngest years, growing up Jewish in an officially Catholic country, and viewing it through the lens of a very Latin American Christianity."
"I chose Mark because it was a chronicle of the passion story, not a polemic," the composer continues. "John was too philosophic, but I also find certain passages to be anti-Semitic. The Gospel of Luke I didn't really know...and Matthew, of course, I couldn't touch because of Bach!" Golijov speaks at length, beautifully, about his envisioning of the Passion in an interview with the Boston Symphony Orchestra:
Most of the solo performers in this newest recording of the St. Mark Passion are the same as in the original recording, including the breathtaking Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, led by Maria Guinand, one of the most important forces in the blossoming of classical music in Venezuela's famed Sistema program; Atlanta Symphony Orchestra music director Robert Spano. The stellar performances, however, also include two newcomers: soprano Jessica Rivera, who has become an important collaborator not just for Golijov but for other composers like John Adams, and the Brazilian vocalist Biella da Costa, who stepped in at the last moment for Luciana Souza, who was plagued by a throat problem.
Among his other projects, Golijov is working simultaneously on a new orchestral work commissioned by a consortium of 35 orchestras; a violin concerto for the Greek soloist Leonidas Kavakos ("amazing," Golijov calls him) to be premiered with Gustavo Dudamel; and an opera, destined for the Metropolitan Opera, with Canadian playwright, actor, and film director Robert LePage that is slated to debut in 2014. "It's an exploration of the work of both Galileo and Stephen Hawking," says Golijov. "There's this amazing Stephen Hawking video online of him taking a zero-gravity flight that really inspired me. I'm playing right now with the idea of the quest for the voice, and the idea of voice as identity." Voice as identity: it's a notion that has propelled Golijov throughout his oeuvre, and one that is likely to continue to resonate amongst his many fans.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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