Chekhov's Mistress
The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov
The good news is that Lincoln Center is having a month long festival, beginning January 22nd, to celebrate the work of Osvaldo Golijov and I’m going to one of the concerts. The bad news is that I’m only going to one: “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” and will miss seeing the concert of Ayre, his latest work, which was nominated for a Grammy.
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The Economist Magazine has a nice summary, saying this of “Ayre” (the cd also has work by Berio):
Mr Golijov wrote the songs on “Ayre”, his latest disc, for his muse, the soprano Dawn Upshaw. Traditional Jewish, Arab and Christian folk melodies and texts from 15th-century Spain are richly and eclectically scored for instruments that range from viola to laptop. The songs juxtapose themes of love, jealousy, religion, rage and war. The second song sets gruesome lyrics to a lovely, traditional melody with gentle string accompaniment. This melts into the introduction of the third song, which sounds, for a few seconds, like the work of an angry techno DJ.
and this of “La Pasión Según San Marcos:”
A fine example of this talent is his seminal work, “La Pasión Según San Marcos”, which sets the story of Jesus’s crucifixion in contemporary Latin America. He invites his listeners to a jubilant Latin carnival, with blaring trumpets, hypnotic percussion, infectious samba and mambo rhythms. Along the way, ecstatic choruses, Gregorian chant and mournful Brazilian ballades wind towards the Kaddish, a fitting way for a Jewish composer to conclude a piece based on the Book of Mark.
I love Golijov’s work. It’s passionate, adventurous and undoubtedly multi-cultural, and not in a watered down way that you find in a lot of so-called world music, but sophisticated and rich, sometimes difficult and always worth spending time getting into like you might with a good book.
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