Osvaldo Golijov

* Last Round *
* Lullaby and Doina **
* Yiddishbbuk ^
* The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind ^^

St. Lawrence String Quartet * ** ^ ^^
Ying Quartet *
Todd Palmer (clarinets) ** ^^
Tara Helen O'Connor (flute) **
Mark Dresser (double bass) * **

EMI 7243 5 57356 2 1 {DDD}  TT: 69:33

Summary for the Busy Executive: A gaucho in Krakow.

Born in Argentina into an eastern-European Jewish family, Osvaldo Golijov
studied there, in Israel, and in the United States as well (with George
Crumb).  Having just nicked 40, he has enjoyed a hot career -- as far
as these things go among classical composers -- thoroughly deserved.
His super-Latino Pasion Segun San Marcos has made a bid to become the
next big classical choral hit since Britten's War Requiem.  And to think
he has decades in his career to go.

I also find his music uneven.  The incredible stands side-by-side with
the nothing much.  I'd classify him as a musical omnivore.  He has taken
from all kinds of sources.  One hears Piazzolla, klezmer, Yiddish folk
music, Reichian minimalism, definitely Crumb, perhaps a bit of Prokofiev,
but, at the music's best, these sources all come together in fresh and
surprising ways.  Golijov, I feel, has found something both new and
powerfully familiar -- something, in the words of Vaughan Williams, that
"I've known all my life, but I didn't know it."

My favorite work on the CD, Last Round, a string nonet in written homage
to Piazzolla, begins with a roar.  I write "nonet," but Golijov conceives
it really for two opposing string quartets.  He arranges the quartets
so that they face off against each other, off the focal point of the
double bass.  This brings a visual element into the piece (lost, of
course, on CD) of brandished bows -- a meta-musical metaphor for the
"combat" of the tango.  Last Round consists of two movements: a violent
one, which, after the rhythmic energy of a work like Bartok's fourth
string quartet, slides without pause into an elegiac second movement.
Throughout both movements, one hears tango-ish backbeats.  I have no
idea what Piazzolla was really like, but this piece portrays the flamboyant
excess (both the high dudgeon and the low sentimentality) of a man
drowning in his own testosterone.  Based on the impressions of this
piece, you probably wouldn't want to have eaten dinner with Piazzolla,
any more than you would want to have dined with a tiger.  Both the tiger
and the nonet display a "fearful symmetry."

The Lullaby and Doina come from movie music for Sally Potter's Man Who
Cried.  Golijov adds flute, clarinet, and double bass to the string
quartet to produce an intimate, dream-like sound.  Despite the title,
the piece consists of three short movements, with a "Gallop" finale.
The music evokes Eastern-European folk song and dance in a fairly
conventional way, similar to Williams's music for Schindler's List, but
more economical.  Last Round commands your attention.  Lullaby and Doina
asks only to be loved.

The earliest work on the CD, Yiddishbbuk, for string quartet, is a kind
of compression of the twentieth-century Jewish experience, from Europe
to the modern diaspora.  Golijov dedicates the first movement to three
children who died at Terezin, the second to the Yiddish-American writer
I.  B.  Singer, and the third to Leonard Bernstein.  The title is unusual,
even to Jews, and refers to a cabalistic text of apocryphal psalms that
perished in the Holocaust.  We know of it only from Kafka's notebooks
and from his letters to Milena.  The title comes across as a pun: the
Yiddish book, the Yiddish dybbuk, a ghost of a culture moving through
the world.  The first movement begins, in Kafka's words, "as a broken
song played on a shattered cymbalon," leads to a Crumb-like stasis, and
finishes up with a Hungarian rondo.  The second movement explores more
fully the stasis as a lament.  Musically, the third movement has more
to do with Crumb's Black Angels than with anything by Bernstein.  It is
an intensely dramatic series of fragments, sounding like several cantors
chanting different psalms simultaneously.  Often without anything like
a conventional tune, it nevertheless sings.  It ends in, as it were,
mid-sentence.

The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind moves away from Crumb toward
something both more characteristic and more conventional, but in a good
way.  Conventions, after all, are there to be rediscovered and reinvigorated.
Golijov weaves through Dreams and Prayers both traditional High Holy Day
prayers and klezmer music.  By far the longest work on the program,
I really can't describe its effect.  It must be experienced.  Golijov
resorts to several techniques, including a minimalist kind of ostinato
for the fast sections and the string quartet, while the clarinet coos
and wails in its own time above this.  The second movement sounds as if
it tries to bring into blossom the tune "The Old Klezmer Band" (according
to the composer).  The tune finally breaks out in full klezmer glory,
only to dissolve into fragments from both clarinet and quartet that seem
to search for some transcendent melody.  The fragments suddenly coalesce
again into the klezmer music, dissolve, and coalesce briefly and distantly
yet again at the very end.  The third movement takes up the prayer mode
again, this time singing beautifully and calmly, in a manner that seems
to stop time -- a bit like a Yiddish Lark Ascending.  It proceeds as two
long crescendos.  Dreams and Prayers ends with a quiet postlude which
peters out.  As I say, I can find musical gadgets traceable to other
composers, but they mean something different here.  The ostinati may
derive from minimalism, but they sound like Bartok abstracted.  The
klezmer music may remind one of Shostakovich or Prokofiev in spots, but
again its meaning differs.  The klezmer melts into the prayers which
melt into the klezmer -- as if we look at two sides of the same mystical
search.  This is not merely a matter of exotic color, but a portrait of
some fundamental, sacred space.  Again, I can't really begin to describe
the effect -- in many ways, an unfamiliar effect or, rather, an unfamiliar
poetry.  All this points to a powerful individual voice which you have
to hear to begin to understand.

The performances are tremendous.  I've heard of absolutely none of the
performers before, but you can bet I'll be looking for them from now on.
The St.  Lawrence delivers its loud and fast sections with an almost
physical wallop.  Tara Helen O'Connor and especially Todd Palmer play
with the intensity of exploration, as if they've made it all up at that
moment.  The extremes of dynamics (both loud and soft) and the extreme
speeds of transitions (both fast and slow) come across not as something
rehearsed (although they've all probably rehearsed the bejeezus out of
these pieces), but as something alive.

I find the "sound picture" too forward to be ideal, but that's absolutely
secondary to the works and the performances.

Steve Schwartz