Chekhov's Mistress
Listening: Oceana by Osvaldo Golijov
Just released this month, Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana
From the liner notes:
The shadow of J. S. Bach falls across the creation of Oceana. In 1996 the German conductor Helmuth Rilling commissioned a series of “Cantatas of the Americas” for his annual Bach Festival at the University of Oregon and chose Golijov as one of the composers. Golijov, in turn, chose Pablo Neruda, “a Latin-American Bach, able to transform everything on earth into poetry.” “My aim in Oceana,” he continues “was, like Bach, to transmute passion into geometry, to transmute water and longing, light and hope, the immensity of South America’s nature and pain into pure musical symbols.”
The poem is drawn from Neruda’s Cantos Ceremoniales of 1961. Already from the text we know that the poet’s ocean is a warm one, ruled by a golden goddess. Golijov’s setting calls for an exotic scoring of Latin American and African percussion instruments and an ensemble of amplified guitars and harp. Neruda’s words, “too powerful for a single voice to sing,” according to the composer, are given to a double chorus that includes children’s voices. The goddess’s siren songs, both texted and wordless, are taken up by the dazzling Brazilian pop/folk/classical star Luciana Souza.
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