Published on Tuesdays
|
----Advertisement----
Mickey Butts
Executive Director, Editor, and Publisher
|
By Jeff Dunn
Running more than a little late, the San Francisco Symphony will finally hop aboard the Osvaldo Golijov bandwagon next week. Golijov, one of the world's most famous composers, will debut in Davies Hall Oct. 18-21 under the baton of Semyon Bychkov with Last Round, a tribute to his idol, fellow Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla.
Golijov is not just a well-schooled, talented composer who has impressed the cognoscenti. He has hit most people who have heard him like a bombshell. Last summer, Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe wrote, "When Osvaldo Golijov bounded onstage at Tanglewood after the world-premiere performance of his Azul, the audience — 8,692 people — greeted the composer like a rock star."
Golijov's recent opera Ainadamar was hailed as "stunning," "mesmerizing," "gorgeous," and "amazing" by a number of critics. And back in 2001, Alex Ross of The New Yorker had this to say about the Stuttgart premiere of La Pasión Según San Marcos:
Audiences reacted with … abandon, applauding and shouting for 20 minutes. "War Madonna im Saal?" asked the Stuttgarter Nachrichten. "Oder wenigstens Michael Jackson? [Was Madonna in the house? Or Michael Jackson?]" No — in the house was a 39-year-old Argentinean of Eastern European-Jewish descent, who, until Pasión, was known as the composer of a piece for string quartet and klezmer clarinet. … Golijov is a huge talent, with limitless possibilities in front of him.Fortunately, Bay Area new-music fans haven't had to wait for the Symphony to bring Golijov to town. Not only are many of his works available on CD, but the chamber version of Last Round was performed at the 2005 Green Music Festival in Rohnert Park (see review). The chamber works Yiddishbbuk and The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind have been performed at least twice each since 2001 (and the latter will be performed yet again by the Gold Coast Players in April 2007). Golijov's magnum opus so far, the Pasión, was performed at Stanford nearly four years ago.
What is it about this composer that keeps the performances coming?
I would cite five qualities in particular: Golijov's ear, his heart, his sense of drama, his feeling for melodic line, and the breadth of his sources of inspiration. Let's take the last characteristic first, for it is the most distinctive. Golijov's background encompasses cultural influences high and low. This would in itself make him a darling of the world-music movement, but there's much more. His ear ensures that the ravishing new sounds he creates do not drown each other out. His heart injects passion into all that he does, but his sense of drama makes sure not only that there are climactic moments, but that they occur as part of a structurally sound arc of development. Finally, his gift for melody and its transformation makes his material flow and sing, sugar for the must-eat cake.
Osvaldo Golijov
Photo by Sarah Evans
Golijov was born in La Plata, Argentina, in 1960. His mother was a piano teacher; his father, a physician. Arriving in the U.S. in 1986 after studying music for three years in Israel, he earned a Ph.D. in composition at the University of Pennsylvania, studying with George Crumb and, later, Oliver Knussen. He will share composer-in-residence duties with Marc-Anthony Turnage at the Chicago Symphony during the next two seasons, and he is a professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. There is, however, nothing overly academic or stuffy about his music, or his descriptions of it — heart first, theory later.
Last Round is Golijov's 14-minute, two-movement homage to Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), the great Argentine transformer of the tango and other musical forms. The work is not only inspired by Piazzolla, but by his instrument, the bandoneón. The first movement is based on a story with the same name by Julio Cortázar: A prizefighter gets a chance to come back from the dead for one last round. Piazzolla, short of stature, was famous for his fighting, especially when someone would rile him by asking, "Could you play a tango?" You see, everything he'd been playing before was a tango, but in an unconventional form that irked traditionalists. Golijov's second movement, much of which was written earlier, is an elegy to both Piazzolla and the tango itself.
On Sept. 27, I reached Osvaldo Golijov by phone in the Boston area, where he was busily working on the score for Francis Ford Coppola's next film.
How did you come to be interested in the life and music of Astor Piazzolla?
I first saw [Piazzolla] in La Plata when I was a kid. I went to Buenos Aires to hear him, and then to New York, many times through the late '80s. When I first heard him, it completely transformed my life forever. … I never had heard music by a leading composer, let alone somebody who could synthesize so beautifully all the music that I love: Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky — well, not Mozart, maybe. … And also the phrasing of the bandoneón and all the instruments in the ensemble: It's a very clear distillation of the way in which people spoke and walked in the '60s in Argentina. So I could clearly see the connection between life and music. It was something I could not see in the pieces I was playing on the piano, because for me that was only music. Until then, I always had to ask, 'How do you phrase this, how do you phrase that work?' But with Piazzolla's music everything was so clear because the pressures and the releases came from the way in which people lived and spoke and walked and joked and cried and screamed.
So did he become a model for you? Although you didn't decide to go into fistfights, did you?
Yes, absolutely, yes — but no, no, no! I'm much more peaceful.
When [Piazzolla] had his stroke, my father called me and told me, and I was really very devastated about it. I never met him personally — I saw many of his concerts, but I never had the nerve to go speak to him. Several times I have dreamed I would come to him with Last Round and show it to him and he would say, "It's good, but it's too late!"
In the first movement, I seem to hear contours of the Dies Irae. Was that conscious, or not?
It's possible — why not? But not conscious. I was trying to find the figure that I could pass from orchestra to orchestra. [The piece is written for two string orchestras, facing each other, with basses in between.] You know, when you dance the tango, it's a constant provocation from one [partner] to the other. I guess I was looking for that.
----Advertisement----Do you have any Piazzolla quotations in the piece?
In the second movement, there's kind of a double quotation. There's a beautiful Piazzolla tango called Milonga del Angel [the Milonga is a type of Argentinean dance in 2/4 time with accents on the first, fourth, fifth, and seventh of every eight beats; it is also the name of a place where tangos are danced], but at the same time the melodic figure is very much like what might be called the national anthem of tango, which is My Beloved Buenos Aires [Mi Buenos Aires querido], by Carlos Gardel. Piazzolla himself acted in a movie with Gardel. For a while, as a child, he lived in New York, and Gardel was at that time shooting some movies for the Latin American market. In [one of them, El Dia Que Me Quieras (The Day You Love Me)], he played a newspaper boy!
I never think of my piece as a tango, because it's not. In a much simpler way, it's like what Ravel did in La Valse: It's not a waltz; it's a memorial to the era of the waltz.
What made you add the first movement, after writing the memorial to Piazzolla?
I thought it needed it. [For] the second movement, which I wrote first, the idea was the bandoneón — the opening and closing, the breathing of the bandoneón. But ultimately, it's a big opening of the bandoneón. I loved when I watched Piazzolla play. He would open the bandoneón almost to the infinite. He would spread it like an eagle. In a way, the second movement is a huge exhalation. My thought was about making a first movement that is in a state of constant compression. A little bit like in Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence in the first movement [Allegro con spirito]. I always feel it's a movement that acts like when you send a rocket into space and it starts losing parts [the stages fall away], and it gets faster and faster. So that's the idea. I thought it would balance well the second movement.
The glissandi that I wrote in the first movement, it's something Piazzolla used to do a lot. I thought it would be nice to do. It's full of gestures of Piazolla, without any direct quotations. He liked doing that. The glissando is also sexual and dancing. …
Tell me about your work with Francis Ford Coppola on his new film, Youth Without Youth.
I'm working on it as we speak. I have to record in late November. I was [at Coppola's estate] in Napa Valley several times, and also in Romania, because he was shooting and editing there [the screenplay is adapted from a novella about immortality by the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade]. It's the best experience that you can imagine! He's a genius. Like a slow-moving volcano. Writing the music is more "mood" than "clock." Very atmospheric. It's not an action film, so, you don't need a watch [to precisely time the music to the action].
What sort of moods did he ask for?
Well, memory, dark memories, danger, time. In the film, time going backwards. He wanted it scored in the language of [Schoenberg's] Verklärte Nacht. It's basically cimbalom, strings, celesta, harp — a very subtle kind of thing. I tried to write something beautiful in that style that's pretty dark and dramatic. I work very hard on the melodies. They don't come easy. Sometimes I find a good one and sometimes I don't.
Are you conscious of being a famous composer now, and are you wondering what kind of legacy you will leave?
No, no. … Yes and no. Who knows how long this thing will last. It's a strange phenomenon.
You were greeted like a rock star at Tanglewood. How did that feel?
It's strange, like being the Beatles. It's almost like being two people: One is who I am; the other is when you go onstage. It has nothing to do with who I am. It's something that you do: You go onstage and people applaud or they boo you.
If you wrote your Pasión of San Marcos 30 years ago, would the critics have thrown it away?
Yes, yes, it would have been treated like Bernstein's Mass. I'm very lucky I was born when I was born.
Have there been highbrow types who have said you're too popular?
Oh, yes, of course! Mostly, I've been praised and vilified for the wrong reasons. I guess I became the flag for the fight among critics. There was a point when, instead of talking about my music, they were just fighting among themselves. At some point, it annoys you — then you realize that, well, it's life.
I wanted to ask you about the MacArthur Fellowship. What did you do with it?
It's incredible, just incredible. Mostly, I just put it toward the tuitions for my children. It went toward a higher calling! I always worried about how I was going to afford the tuition, but now I will be all right.
Do you have any final comments about Last Round and what you'd like the audience to hear?
The idea, really, is to create a physiological music in the first movement, to make your blood rush. I feel when I listen to Tchaikovsky that he can really affect your bloodstream with his rhythm. You know, when you dance tango, your torso is stiff, but the legs fly.
(Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA and president of Composers Inc.)
Have an opinion about what you've read here or elsewhere in SFCV? Sound off with a letter to the editors.
©2006 Jeff Dunn, all rights reserved.
SFCV is a nonprofit journal supported by foundation grants and individual contributions. If you enjoy what you find here and want to see our work continue, please consider making a contribution. By virtue of a generous matching grant, it will be doubled. Your contribution (tax-deductible) may be made by credit card
by
clicking here, or by a check made out to San Francisco Classical Voice and sent to the San Francisco Foundation CIF, (San Francisco Classical Voice account), 225 Bush St. # 500, San Francisco, CA 94104.
From September 1, 1998, to Oct. 10, 2006, SFCV has published, in addition to our weekly features, Music News, and Listening Ahead columns, 2,529 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 53 symphony orchestras (524 reviews), dozens of recital presenters (442 reviews), 42 opera companies (356 reviews), 94 chamber groups (298 reviews), 39 new-music ensembles and programs (268 reviews), 53 early-music ensembles (199 reviews), 37 choral groups (159 reviews), 17 music festivals (119 reviews), 24 chamber orchestras (97 reviews), six musical theater groups (17 reviews), as well as numerous world music groups (14 reviews), youth music ensembles (13 reviews), and other organizations (14 reviews).
Mary VanClay, Senior Editor
Catherine Getches and Richard Thomas,
Associate Editors
Robert P. Commanday, Founding Editor
Mickey Butts, Mary VanClay, and Catherine Getches read all e-mails sent to editor@sfcv.org. Mickey oversees the overall quality of the site and manages operations- and business-related issues; Mary assigns and edits features, reviews, and the Music News column; Catherine edits reviews, the Listening Ahead column, and the Performance Calendar; Richard assists with production. To e-mail any staffmember individually, click on our names in the list above. Items relevant to the Music News column should also be directed to Janos Gereben at janosg@gmail.com.
To post information about upcoming events, please fill out the form on the Calendar submissions page. (Due to the small size of our staff, we cannot post events for you, although we read with interest any press releases sent to editor@sfcv.org.)
To receive this weekly journal as a free e-mail newsletter, or to unsubscribe, visit the Subscription page. Past articles are available in our Archive. E-mail editor@sfcv.org to report any problems with our service.