Osvaldo Golijov
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Watercolor by Osvaldo Golijov

LAIꓘA world premiere and The Fire Outlives the Spark New York premiere

On April 7 at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, present the world premiere of LAIꓘA, written for Costanzo and the Ensemble, with text by Leah Hager Cohen. The program also includes the New York premiere of The Fire Outlives the Spark, written in honor and memory of violinist Geoff Nutall. (See more about Geoff and The Fire Outlives the Spark here.)

Details


Leah Hager Cohen and Osvaldo Golijov sat down to discuss LAIꓘA as well as Cohen's forthcoming novel To & Fro, due out in May:

LHC: I'd never heard of Laika until you taught me about her.

How did it begin for you, this desire to write a piece about her and the Soviet space dog program?

OG: When I was a child I was fascinated with astronauts, I guess nothing unusual for a boy growing up in the sixties. So I would absorb anything that had to do with them and I discovered that the Soviets actually called their spacemen (they were all men then) "cosmonauts'', which I thought sounded better.

And then! I discovered that before the Soviets felt secure enough (but still wanting to beat the Americans to it) to send into space their first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, they had experimented with dogs, and that the first dog they sent to space was Laika, a street dog from Moscow. The Soviet Space Dogs were all stray street dogs from Moscow. Small in size to fit the capsule, their teeth pulled out so they wouldn't bite their tongues in space, their food being chewed up and mouth fed by the scientists who experimented on them. One day they were roaming the streets of the city for food, the next day they were in the lab, flying in artificially created zero gravity, and the next day out there in the universe, and Laika (her name is derived from "bark" in Russian), I think, was the first ever earthling in space. She died in space, ‘for our sake '' ('our' being the human capacity to go into space, or Soviet glory, or both).

At the time the Soviets told everyone that she died peacefully after five to seven days in space, euthanized as her oxygen supply would dwindle. A great contemporary myth was born. I think only in 2002, 45 years after her death, one of the scientists in the program revealed that she had burned to death only about five to seven hours after the launch. The scientists apparently needed about an extra month to develop a method of peaceful death for Laika, but Nikita Kruschev (the Soviet leader at the time) was adamant that the launch had to happen on October 17, 1957, on the 40th anniversary of the revolution. Other dogs went to space after Laika, and came back alive. Among them were Belka and Strelka (Squirrel and Little Arrow), who became celebrities and would give interviews on Radio Moscow after their return. Strelka had several puppies after the flight, one of them was called Pushinka and was given as a present by Kruschev to President Kennedy in 1961. So if nuclear war had happened because of the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, Pushinka would have probably died then, far from home. As it happens, nuclear war didn't happen, and Pushinka mated with Charlie, one of Kennedy's dogs, and they had four puppies whom Kennedy called pupniks and apparently lived happily ever after. Two of them, Butterfly and Striker, were given to children in the Midwest and kept multiplying, with proven descendents until at least 2015.

The Soviet Space Dogs were big heroes in Argentina, where I grew up, and in many other places in the world. All kinds of memorabilia sprung up, as you noted in some of my favorite lines of your Laika poem: "matchboxes, chocolates, razor blades, watches, postcards, cigarettes, statues, stamps...". If you were a stamp collector in Argentina, as I was when I was a boy, and had a Laika stamp in your collection... Well, I would venture that it was worth much more than what a Pikachu card is worth today. So yes, to give you an idea of how impactful the Soviet Space Dogs were in the imagination of a child far away from Moscow, just think of Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut mentioned above. He said "I don't know if I am the first man or the last dog in space". That line alone is worth an opera.

You know, I think one thing that links LAIꓘA and To & Fro is that the three stories are journeys (maybe you think of To & Fro as only one story with two faces? I'd love to know how you think of it) . So I have two questions (three if you count the one I just asked): can you tell us about the journey in To and the journey in Fro? And how and why is it that there are no bad guys in your stories? I think especially in To... I feared so much for the dangers that Ani might encounter in her journey and even if she met many savory characters, with poignant humor and tender roughness, it's all good people!

LHC: When you asked me to write a poem about Laika for this project, although I had heard you talk about her before, that was the first time I did any research on my own. And one thing I found was the teeth thing - apparently the dogs didn't have their teeth pulled before going to space. It was after returning, for those who made it back alive, that the teeth fell out due to calcium depletion from the ordeal of being in space. Or at least one dog, Veterok, lost his, and the scientists would pre-chew sausage for him as he lived out the rest of his days on earth. I mention this because of what you say about "a great contemporary myth" being born. This fascinates me, the human tendency to mythologize, the way we take actual events and - often quite unintentionally - make stories of them. The changes that take place during this move from event to story can tell us so much about ourselves.

Of course, artists are in the business of doing this intentionally. Distilling something to its essence (or one version of its essence) and then presenting it back to us in a different form, strange and fresh. You've done this with Jesus, Lorca, bereavement, the cosmos...now Laika. You dip your cupped hand into the swirly waters of life, lift something up and translate it into music. You create something new without ever depleting the source. It's like having one's cake and eating it too.

As for journeys and To & Fro, I like what you say about one story with two faces. In fact, one idea in the novel is that "it's all one story." You dip your hand in the swirly water, and I dip my hand in the same swirly water, and it's the same swirly water for everyone! Nina Simone and Chekhov and Beethoven and Olga Tokarczuk and Mahmoud Darwish and Matisse and Basquiat and Eavan Boland and everybody, from little kids drawing with chalk on the sidewalk to those you like to call the Great Motherfuckers. That makes me so happy. We're all working with the same undepletable source material, which is the experience of being a human in the universe, and we make this infinite variety of different things with it. And that's the journey. And everyone can do it.

Sorry, what was the question?
Oh yeah: why no bad guys.
That's an important question, because the harm we do one another in this world is real and must be grappled with, and I would hate to think I've avoided something in my work from a lack of courage. On the other hand, an awful lot of representational art - especially that which is commercially successful - centers violence. If art helps us envision what we might become, then I think there's a place for works that imagine alternative visions, too. I didn't set out to write a book in which the two protagonists are young girls who never encounter the threat of harm, but in retrospect, I think the politics of that are strong. By politics, I mean simply that every act of self-expression is colored by the context in which it takes place, and contributes in some way to the community in which we live. What are the politics of LAIꓘA for you - not the dog but your composition? Do you hate this question, do you reject the premise? Even so, will you say something about what it brings up for you?

OG: I like it when you say "if art helps us envision what we might become". It reminds me of something Wayne Shorter said, I think, to Danilo Perez: "write the music for a world in which you'll want to live". Sometimes I forget it, so thank you for reminding me. What are the politics of LAIꓘA for me? It's not that I hate the question, but I know that I will not be able to articulate in words all the themes in the constellation of themes that LAIꓘA represents for me. Mainly I'd say that Laika the dog didn't want to be a hero. I think she liked her street dog fate. I can't say for sure, I don't know the street dogs in Moscow, but the ones in La Plata, the city where I grew up, seemed pretty happy to me in their street wanderings. That's why I love the first refrain in your poem: "sausages, black bread, chicken dumplings, chicken grease!" You mentioned Lorca. He didn't want to be a hero either. His entire reason to write his play Mariana Pineda (a woman who was executed a century before Lorca himself was executed, part of the plot of Ainadamar) was to bring Mariana back to life, take her out from the statue that people who need heroes built for her (“she was not gray, not cold, not even pure”, as David Hwang’s libretto puts it). I think most people would prefer love to heroics (but of course many heroic acts are acts of love, so it is complex). Dogs for sure, they are love. In any case, I don't know if what I just said relates to the politics of LAIꓘA. I can only tell you the unresolved questions that LAIꓘAbrings in me: the nature of love, the nature of power, the paradox of loving dearly a child or a dog and sending them to die in a war or in a space capsule, the need for heroes we spoke above, and other things: But mainly, I wrote it because I wished to collaborate with you in this long song, and had (and have) a great curiosity to see what Anthony Roth Costanzo does when singing as Laika.

But I am even more curious about To & Fro than I am about LAIꓘA. Do you know why Ani steals a kitten? How did it ever occur to you to write an entire novel out of a short parable by Kafka? Do you remember? You know I love the Ferryman so much, and I don't want to introduce spoilers here, but how did you come up with him and his sense of humor? Yes,that's another reason I love To & Fro: there's so much banter going on.

LHC: I love your move from politics to unresolved questions. Politics, as I was using it, invites thinking about the relationship between artwork and society - the society in which the art is created, and the society into which it will venture forth. Unresolved questions, as I hear it, suggests something at once far more intimate and limitlessly large: the relationship between soul and wonder. And there is room here for everything, isn't there? Love and paradox, children and dogs, war and space and heroes and myths and duets and sausages.

I hear that in your music. Intimacy and infinity. When I am writing I am in a state of not-knowing; this makes me very bad at responding to questions about what I have done and why.
- I did not realize Ani was going to steal a kitten until it happened, as it were, in the writing. As if I myself were the girl in the story, I had the experience, while writing, of "looking down" and seeing the kitten there on "my" palm.
- And it never occurred to me to spin an entire novel out of a parable by Kafka. If the prospect had presented itself like that, I probably would have fled in terror. What happened was that I simply found myself - almost idly, almost without noticing what I was doing - sketching out a kind of scene in which I picked up where his parable leaves off.
- The ferryman, too. I don't feel I "made" him. It was as if he already existed, and I had only to feel my way toward where he entered, and to listen really really well to how he sounded, what he looked like, how he walked and smoked his pipe and harrumphed and was gruff and underneath the gruffness, was a big gentle softie.

And thank you! Because your question has surfaced something very central to the book, which is the idea of the artist "making" something vs. midwiving something into being. The latter contains the sense of that something being already alive, having a life of its own, and being imbued with a mystery the artist neither designed nor can ever fully resolve. (Speaking of unresolved questions.)

This is a key part of Annamae's story. With a kind of spiritual stubbornness she is unable to explain, she refuses to complete her English teacher's creative writing assignment, which she sees as forcing her to make something inert and false, akin to engaging in idolatry. I love Annamae's stubbornness. The irony isn't lost on me that she, a fictional character of my own "making," rails against the notion of creating fictional characters, who by definition lack free will.

Not even God, she says, would do such a thing.

What gives me solace is the possibility that she's neither inert nor entirely of my making. Because she continues to puzzle and beguile me, and I can continue to learn from her…

OG: And thank you!


The Fire Outlives the Spark

Geoff Nuttall was and is my brother in life and in music. We shared formative and memorable adventures together for 30 years. Here is Jeremy Eichler’s wonderful appreciation of Geoff’s extraordinary life that appeared in the Boston Globe. 

Last year Geoff asked if I would write a piece for when he was gone. I wrote an aria called The Fire Outlives the Spark. The text consists of lines excerpted from Shelley’s Adonais that read to me like a true portrait of Geoff. 

The Fire Outlives the Spark

Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;
He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he.

He is made one with Nature:
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known.

He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's Light.


On May 26, Spoleto Festival USA presents a concert celebrating Geoff Nuttall. The Fire Outlives the Spark is included in the program, that features Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra and many special guests. As Spoleto puts it: “To honor Nuttall’s curatorial genius and infectious enthusiasm, some of his closest musical colleagues and special guest stars perform a concert of virtuosic debauchery—a brilliant tribute to a singular artist”

Details


On April 13th, the Brentano Quartet, stepping in for the St Lawrence String Quartet, joins the Thalea Quartet in a performance of Ever Yours at the University of Maryland.

Details


On January 29, dozens of Geoff’s friends participate in a concert at Stanford University to celebrate his life. Included in the program is the first performance of The Fire Outlives the Spark, sung by Anthony Roth Costanzo, accompanied by a small orchestra formed by Geoff’s friends.

Details


Falling Out of Time tour—Spring 2023

Note from Osvaldo

As we get ready to embark on this next Falling Out of Time tour, there is a rush of emotions that fill the heart while remembering the long gestation process of the work with these dear, extraordinary musicians and crew.  

I remember vividly the beginning: the morning in Tel Aviv, I think it was 2013, when, just because I had some free time, I went into a bookstore and picked up David Grossman’s “novel in voices,” and sat on a park bench to read it. In the first page of the novel, a man, a husband, a bereaved father, says to his wife: “I have to go there.” As I read that line I knew that I didn’t want to die without trying to, musically speaking, “go there” myself. After all these years, working alone at the piano and together with the incredibly creative collaborator-musicians who are touring the work, I have to confess that my imagination remains limited: I am not brave enough to fully imagine what it means to walk that walk, to “go there” in real life.  

But we did not avert our gaze. Perhaps that is all that we, the ones who did not experience that unimaginable loss, can aspire to. To not avert our gaze when we meet the people who are walking that walk. 

Of the many memorable moments that we lived through together over these years, the one which remains as the most potent, the moment that gave shape to the piece and, I believe, shaped us as humans and musicians, was when David talked to us in a workshop of the work-in-progress that we held in the winter of 2019 at the chapel of the College of the Holy Cross’s Joyce Contemplative Center. He told us how grief is a form of exile, how a mother and a father who loved their child with the same intensity are each one living in a different island of grief. How one falls out of time while time goes on. How all you can hope for is to trust the voice of that boy in the book who sings a lullaby to all the parents: “There is breath, there is breath, inside the pain, there is breath.” 

I think I can speak for all of us, musicians and crew, when I say: Thank you, David. Thank you for your courage in writing the book, and thank you for your extraordinary generosity in teaching us how to be human.

Tour details

Houston, TX - DACAMERA: April 15 and 16. Details

Chapel Hill, NC - Carolina Performing Arts: April 20. Details

Boston, MA - The Vilna Shul - April 23. conversation about the work with Osvaldo, Nora Fischer and Yoni Rechter (no performance). Details

Boston, MA - The Boston Symphony Orchestra presented in association with Celebrity Series: April 30. Details

Biella da Costa, Woman
Nora Fischer, Centaur
Yoni Rechter, Man

Company
Dan Brantigan, trumpet, flugelhorn and suona
Megan Conley, harp
Shawn Conley, acoustic bass and electric fretless bass
Jeremy Flower, guitar and modular synthesizer
Johnny Gandelsman, violin
Mario Gotoh, viola
Karen Ouzounian, cello
Shane Shanahan, percussion and drum set
Mazz Swift, violin

Production Staff
Charlie Campbell, monitor engineer
Cristin Canterbury Bagnall, executive producer (the shepherd)
Lauren Cavanaugh, stage manager and associate production manager
Aaron Copp, production manager and lighting designer
Cat J. Cusick, lighting director
Jody Elff, sound engineer
Johnny Gandelsman, music director
Maile Okamura, costume designer
Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams, scenic designer
Camilla Tassi, projection designer, based on art work by Mary Frank

Tour Management
Johnny Gandelsman, In a Circle Records
Cristin Canterbury Bagnall and Lori Taylor, BroadBand Collaborative


Um Dia Bom recording released on February 17, 2023

Osvaldo's Note

My dear Brooklyn Rider friends are releasing a live album called The Wanderer. There’s an astonishing performance of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, together the beautiful Aroma a Distancia composed by another dear friend, Gonzalo Grau, and  my own Um Dia Bom, which I composed for Brooklyn Rider in 2021. 

Details and purchase options at bandcamp.com‣


Winter/spring 2023 productions of Ainadamar: Indiana, Montreal, Detroit

 

Opera de Montreal | Mar 18-26 | More info

Detroit Opera | April 8-16 | More info


Falling Out of Time tour—October/November 2022

Los Angeles, CA—The WALLIS: October 27. Details

VANCOUVER, BC—The Chan Centre: October 29. Details

Portland, OR—The Reser: NOVEMBER 1. Details


Chicago, IL—The Harris: November 3. Details

University of Maryland—The Clarice: NOVEMBER 5. Details

UNiversity of Pennsylvania—Zellerbach Theater: November 6. Details

Biella da Costa, Woman
Nora Fischer, Centaur
Yoni Rechter, Man

Dan Brantigan, Trumpet, Flugelhorn
Hannah Collins, Cello
Shawn Conley, Acoustic bass, Electric Fretless Bass
Jeremy Flower, Electric Guitar, Modular Synthesizer
Johnny Gandelsman, Violin
Mario Gotoh, Viola
Shane Shanahan, Percussion, Drum Set
Mazz Swift, Violin
Reylon Yount, Yangqin

Cristin Canterbury Bagnall, executive producer (the shepherd)
Johnny Gandelsman, music director

Charlie Campbell, monitor engineer
Lauren Cavanaugh, stage manager
Aaron Copp, production manager and lighting designer
Cat J. Cusick, lighting director
Jody Elff, sound engineer
Maile Okamura, costume designer
Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams, scenic designer
Camilla Tassi, projection design, based on art work by Mary Frank


New production of Ainadamar at Scottish Opera—October/November 2022

Scottish Opera presents the UK staged premiere of Osvaldo's opera Ainadamar in a new production by Deborah Colker. A co-production with Opera Ventures, Detroit Opera, The Metropolitan Opera and Welsh National Opera, Ainadamar will be performed in Glasgow on October 29 and November 2 and 5, and in Edinburgh on November 8, 10 and 12.

Details and tickets scottishopera.org


Ever Yours at Spoleto

Note from Osvaldo

Spoleto USA just posted a video of their 2022 Chamber Music Program III, which included extraordinary performances of Haydn's Quartet Op. 76, No. 2 (Quinten) and Ever Yours, the string octet I wrote earlier this year.

If you have the time, please listen to both pieces, as each of the movements of Ever Yours is based on the corresponding movement of the Haydn quartet. The video will be available to view through October 31, 2022.

I was thinking today that any human being who says the words "I love you" is a lucky being. Those of us who can say that in music rather than words are even luckier.

Haydn's Op. 76, No. 2

watch/listen‣

St Lawrence String Quartet

Geoff Nuttall, violin
Owen Dalby, violin
Lesley Robertson, viola
Christopher Costanza, cello

Ever Yours

I. Sowing Fifths watch/listen‣

II. Starbound watch/listen‣

III.You Reap What You Sow watch/listen‣

IV. Papa watch/listen‣

St Lawrence String Quartet, with

Livia Sohn, violin
Amy Schwartz Moretti, violin
Ayane Kozasa, viola
Paul Wiancko, cello


Dog

Summer notes from Osvaldo

Now that we are living the end of the dog days of summer, I remember summer’s beginning in Charleston, where an all-star ensemble led by Geoff Nuttall performed a bustling-with-life Ever Yours at the Spoleto USA Festival. Speaking of dogs, the last movement of that piece is an homage to the nineteen barking dogs my uncle Jose kept at his house. Beautiful days with beautiful friends. I then accompanied my beloved Leah to Italy, where she had a book tour of her novel Strangers and Cousins (Matrimonio in Cinque Atti in Italian). In my family we call “sha-la-lah” to those accompanying the touring person, as in “the touring person is the soloist and we are the sha-la-lah backup singers”.

It is the most enjoyable thing, to be a sha-la-lah or, in this case, a Sha-la-Leah. I also spent 10 magical days as composer-in-residence at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland.

Q: What is my favorite music?
A: Chamber music.

Q: Are we condemned to sameness when it comes to performance?
A: No. It is wonderful to experience the difference between European and American musicians' music-making.

Q: Is it possible to make new friends late in life?
A: Yes, I loved meeting such wonderful new friends there! And loved those midnight summer Finnish sunsets that actually don’t go to twilight but straight to dawn (see picture). Especially with after-concert grilled sausages and vodka.

I taught for a week in Tanglewood, where I met inspiring young composers and, sadly, missed teaching in person at Maine’s Kneisel Hall, because of Señor Covido. And I heard in Ravinia a moving performance by Marin Alsop and the Chicago Symphony of Rose of the Winds, in a program together with Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony. What a treat to spend a few days with my dear friends Kayhan Kalhor, David Krakauer, Cristina Pato, and Michael Ward-Bergeman, who were the soloists Rose of the Winds. The work ends with a chorus of Shofars which were played by the young members of the music band of the Highland Park High School. They had been set to march and play on the July 4th parade at which the mass shooting took place.

I will return to Italy in September, to be in the Jury of the Vladimir Mendelssohn Composition Competition, held in memory of Vlady Mendelssohn, an extraordinary musician and composer who directed the Kuhmo Festival for many years.


Recently released recordings

La Pasión según San Marcos
Hännsler Classic has reissued the September 2000 world premiere recording of La Pasión según San Marcos, alongside Sofia Gubaidulina's St. John Passion (2000) and St. John Easter (2006).

Nazareno
Sir Simon Rattle, the London Symphony Orchestra, and Katia and Marielle Labèque perform Gonzalo Grau's arrangement for two pianos and orchestra of several movements of La Pasión según San Marcos.

Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra
Soprano Ruby Hughes joins United Strings of Europe on their new album Renewal, in an arrangement of Three Songs by Julian Azkoul, USE's director.

Last Round
Osvaldo's tribute to Astor Piazzolla is presented in this recording by the Jupiter and Jasper String Quartets.


New York Premiere of Falling Out of Time—May 6, 2022

Carnegie Hall presents members of the Silkroad Ensemble performing the New York premiere of Falling Out of Time.

Details and tickets carnegiehall.org

You--
Where are you?
What are you?
And how are you there?
And who are you there?

Program Notes by Leah Hager Cohen

Falling Out of Time is a journey to nowhere — or more accurately, a journey to no where. For the dead are no longer in time or place, and those who love them and would follow them must seek a route beyond linear boundaries. This is a kind of madness, and a kind of truth.

The seed of this musical project was sown at a 2002 encounter between Osvaldo Golijov and Yitzhak Frankenthal, founder of The Parents Circle, an organization of Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family members to the ongoing conflict. Mr. Frankenthal shared the story of a bereaved father who could not reconcile himself to leaving his dead son and reentering the world of time. For many days he remained at his son’s side, at night sleeping upon the grave. Narrating with his actions a story of madness and truth.

The seed found soil 12 years later, when Osvaldo read David Grossman’s brilliant, almost unbearable novel about a man who walks, a father who describes with his feet impossible, ever-widening circles, driven to go to his dead son.

The notion of losing one’s child conjures, in Osvaldo’s words, the utmost pain imaginable, a supernova of pain. Is it madness to try to translate such experience into words, into music? Perhaps. A supernova is very big. But as one of the characters says, there is “Great, definitive death” – boundless, eternal, immortal – and then there is “Your single, little death, / inside it.”

In a sense, it is the “single, little death” that both David Grossman and Osvaldo take for their starting points. They enter the fathomless through the particular, the palpable, the present. One foot placed in front of the other. One heartbeat at a time. Ka-thunk. Ka-thunk. We are very much in time – music is nothing if not an organization of time – and in motion. The father is joined by other townsfolk, each having lost a child; each railing against circumstance; each compelled on a relentless walk of resistance at once mad and true. The heartbeat and the walking, the walking and the heartbeat. The body’s humble metronomes – the very movements that separate the living from the dead – allow the journey.

We find a crucial counterpoint to these rhythms in the questions that erupt from the walkers. Osvaldo, for whom the novel is “a book of questions,” has distilled from it three, which we hear again and again. At times a cry to pierce the sky, at times an echo swollen with tenderness: Where are you? Who are you there? How are you there? To ask, a form of madness. To refrain from asking, another.

And the questions themselves contain echoes of the sorely missed children – indeed, of all children: their lovely doggedness, their lively insistence on asking the unanswerable. We all go in circles, children with their hunger to know why? where? who? how? and grownups who in suffering find we have not lost the appetite: “teach me – as I not long ago / taught you – / the world and all its secrets.” All of us circling, circling, until in time we come to perceive that perhaps the “walk itself is both / the answer and the question.”

*

“Great, definitive death” touches us all, yet grief is always isolating. Each “single, little death” inflicts its separate suffering, a unique exile. Even parents mourning the same child do not share the same grief.

A coda to the story about the bereaved father who could not bear to leave his son’s grave: When Mr. Frankenthal heard about this man, he went to the cemetery. And remained there. Day and night he kept company with this man, until he was able to rise back up and reenter the world and time.

Perhaps more than an act of making art, the joining of Osvaldo’s musical voice to David Grossman’s literary one is an act of accompaniment. And by collaborating with the Silkroad Ensemble in the creation of this piece, Osvaldo widens the circle of accompaniment. Accompaniment is not a cure for grief. But it may be the opposite of madness.

Sitting shiva, the Jewish custom of gathering around the bereaved for seven days after a death, is a ritualized form of accompaniment. Falling Out of Time, with its ever-expanding circles of community – from the townsfolk in the novel to the musicians bringing it to the stage – might be thought of as a walking shiva, an act of accompaniment that remains, like the breath of the living, in motion.

There is
breath
there
is breath
inside the pain
there is breath

falling-out-of-time.jpg

Manuscript, Death and the Maiden

Songs of Love and Death with Anne Sophie von Otter and Brooklyn Rider—April 2022

Anne Sophie von Otter and Brooklyn Rider perform Songs of Love and Death (2021), featuring Osvaldo Golijov's arrangements of Schubert songs, and songs by Rufus Wainwright, interspersed between movements of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden string quartet. Performances throughout April in Germany, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.

TOUR DATES AND TICKET INFO AT BROOKLYNRIDER.COM


World Premiere of Arum dem Fayer for Mandolin and String Quartet—March 12, 2022

Brooklyn Rider and Avi Avital present the world premiere of Arum dem Fayer at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater, presented by San Francisco Performances. The premiere will be followed by performances in New York, Boston, Palm Beach, FL, Stuart, FL, and Philadelphia.

TOUR DATES AND TICKET INFO AT BROOKLYNRIDER.COM

Osvaldo's Notes

Arum dem Fayer or “Around the Fire” is a traditional Yiddish song that also talks about the bliss of being together around a small fire. In my version, the song appears and disappears, as a ghost, in the midst of a slow processional and restrained tears. Schubert’s motif of the slow movement of Death and the Maiden is in the background throughout that first section. A different manifestation of Death interrupts the processional in a short and furiously baroque appearance that opens the door to three funny and mischievous dance variations on the B section of the Yiddish song. The movement closes with the reemergence of the opening processional. I wrote this movement in memory of Guillermo Limonic, who loved singing in Yiddish, and died of Covid in the early days of the pandemic.

Picasso: Mandolin and Guitar, 1924


World Premiere of Ever Yours for String Octet—February 10, 2022

St. Lawrence String Quartet and Telegraph Quartet present the world premiere of Ever Yours at San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Hume Concert Hall. Ever Yours is a co-commission by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam, and the Clarice Smith Center at the University of Maryland at Columbia.

Details, tickets and Live Stream info at SFCM.EDU

Osvaldo's Notes

When the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale invited me to write an octet for its now-canceled festival this year, I went back to re-read the letters from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo. I was struck and inspired once again by the intensity of Vincent’s being in the world, his attention to all the different kinds of blues (in just one paragraph about a walk he took along the seashore, he talks about “the deep blue sky flecked with blues deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt”, and goes on to talk of the “blue whiteness of the Milky Way”… and finds in the sparkling stars “opals, emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires…”). I was struck even more deeply by Vincent’s ending every letter to his beloved brother with an “ever yours”.

After 30 years of life and music adventures together, I feel that there is a quality of “everyourness” to the friendship between the St Lawrence String Quartet and me. Especially with Geoff Nuttall, to whom I am dedicating this piece, I feel a sense of brotherhood. I think he also lives in that state of everyourness, with the yourness part of the idea being his immense love for Haydn and his attention to, and delight in, every one of the extraordinary turns that Haydn’s quartets gift us; and Geoff’s love for, and attention to California’s native vegetation, and to each of his thousands of records, and, especially, to the extraordinary friends and musicians who play together with him in the St Lawrence String Quartet.

Vitality, Love and Attention. Somebody said that true love is attention. “Love-is-Attention” is what connects Haydn and Van Gogh. That concentrated attention that unveils new and new dimensions in what we all see and hear, but, many times, we fail to notice until they notice and they invite us to notice too.

Vitality, Love, Attention. In short, those are the qualities that I hope pervade this new work.

The octet is in four movements. Each of them focuses on some striking figure of the corresponding movements in Haydn’s Quartet Op. 76, Number 2 and takes those figures to places different than the ones Haydn took them.

The first movement, “Sowing Fifths” is, like Haydn’s, based on a pair of fifths. It’s all about the possibilities latent in that pair of fifths. I think that what Haydn did was to let music speak about music itself, unfolding according to its own laws. In my own way, I tried to do the same. But there is something in my first movement that turned out to be more Janacek than Haydn. Janacek is a place I also love!

The second movement is all built on the first four measures of Haydn’s second movement. It takes that innocent tune for a trip to the stars. Hence its name: “Starbound”.

The third movement, “You reap what you sow”, based on a figure in Haydn’s third movement, is the first minuet I ever wrote in my life and, I hope, not the last. How much fun I had writing that peacocky dance!

The last movement, “Papa”, is a barking dance where the quartets become the many dogs that my uncle had at his home, and the wild way in which they greeted everyone who dared to visit him. Musically, it amplifies the Hungarian Roma influence in the fourth movement of Haydn’s quartet. “Papa”, because that is how Haydn was affectionately called, and also because Geoff is such a great papa to his boys.

Back to that Vincent walk on the seashore that I mentioned earlier. He writes to Theo: “It was not happy, but neither was it sad. It was beautiful”. I hope that whatever beauty and emotion that arise from this octet, is also the consequence of pure patterns and composition. Most of all, I hope that I’ll also continue to develop an everyourness with the musicians of the fantastic Telegraph Quartet who are premiering the piece with my friends in the St Lawrence. I cherished every moment in our rehearsals and am grateful and happy to both quartets for the work and joy we had while working together on it.


World Premiere of Um Día Bom—October 7, 2021

Celebrity Series of Boston’s digital concert series presents the world premiere of Um Día Bom, a new string quartet written for Brooklyn Rider.

Um Día Bom (A Good Day), string quartet in five movements

Pairando No Berço (Hovering in the Cradle)
Mentre la Pioggia (While the rain)
Arum dem Fayer (Around the Fire)
Cavalgando com a Morte (Riding with Death)
Plim (Feather)

Details and tickets (virtual concert) celebrityseries.org

Osvaldo's Notes

What I love above all about Brooklyn Rider’s performances - of any music they play - is the bubble of time, or time-as-space, that they create, enveloping the music and us, the listeners. No matter how much is happening at any given moment, we always find room to hear everything with clarity and space to breathe.

It’s an experience perfectly described by Borges in The Aleph, and illustrated in the bullet scene in The Matrix. Two of my favorite soccer players, Andres Iniesta and Zinedine Zidane, also have that superpower. And Mozart’s music, too, happens always in that ‘bubble of no time’, as does Chick Corea’s, whose presence I felt while writing Um Dia Bom. It is a quality to which I’ve always aspired in my music, and rarely achieved. Sooner or later, pathos takes over. No complaints; as the scorpion would say, “it’s in my nature”.

But I was diligent about getting there in Um Dia Bom. I wrote with thick marker on the large whiteboard next to my piano a list of guiding principles for this piece: Clarity. Line. Light. Elegance. Grace. Delight. Rhythm. Air in the Harmonies. Counterpoint. Make Believe (Representation). Child Wonder. I like to think they are all here, with the exception perhaps of counterpoint, which remains highest on my bucket list of things I want to learn.

Um Dia Bom is just that, A Good Day. Its five movements depict a life from morning to midnight and beyond, but as if told to children. Hovering in the Cradle, the opening movement tries to paint the infinite potential in the eyes of a newborn child. There might be a fairy hovering, or it’s simply the child’s eyes wondering. The second movement, …while the rain… started as a blessing I wrote for the marriage of my oldest daughter, Talia, to Yevgeni, her husband. It takes off from the poem that Vivaldi wrote to accompany the second movement of Winter in the Four Seasons: “To spend content and quiet days near the fire, while, outside, the rain soaks hundreds” You can hear the rain throughout this movement, while a dancing couple glides on the marble floors of an Italian palazzo. Around the Fire, the third movement, is a traditional Yiddish song that also talks about the bliss of being together around a small fire. In my version, the song appears and disappears, as a ghost, in the midst of a slow processional and restrained tears. Schubert’s motif of the slow movement of Death and the Maiden is in the background throughout that first section. A different manifestation of Death interrupts the processional in a short and furiously baroque appearance that opens the door to three funny and mischievous dance variations on the B section of the Yiddish song. The movement closes with the reemergence of the opening processional. I wrote this movement in memory of Guillermo Limonic, who loved singing in Yiddish, and died of Covid in the early days of the pandemic. Riding with Death, the fourth movement, is based on the late Basquiat painting of the same name. It is a sparse painting, in which the horse carrying the Death Rider is represented only by its essential bones, like an X-Ray drawn by a child. The music is a gallop in the viola and cello, over which the violins “X-Ray” the melody of Willie Blind Johnson’s Dark was the Night, playing just filaments and short echoes of the song. Feather, the closing movement, describes a graceful, endless fall of a feather from the sky. Here is where I felt the spirit of Chick Corea more present than ever. He died while I was writing this quartet and at the same time studying his Children Songs.


Japan Premiere of Azul—September 29, 2021

Dai Miyata, cello

Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Michiyoshi Inoue, conductor

Suntory Hall, Tokyo

Details @ yomikyo.or.jp

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World Premiere of Hebraische Milonga—June 7, 2021

Alisa Weilerstein, cello and Inon Barnatan, piano present the world premiere of Hebraische Milonga at Spoleto USA.

LISTEN @ southcarolinapublicradio.org

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Osvaldo Golijov’s works include the St Mark Passion; the opera Ainadamar; Azul, a cello concerto; The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, for clarinet and string quartet; the song cycles Ayre and Falling Out of Time; and the soundtracks for Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, Youth Without Youth, and the upcoming Megalopolis. His most recent work is LAIꓘA, written for Anthony Roth Costanzo and the Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble. He is currently working on The Given Note, a work for violinist Johnny Gandelsman and The Knights, and a Megalopolis Suite for Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He was born in La Plata, Argentina, in 1960, and lived in Jerusalem before immigrating to the US in 1986. He is the Composer-in-Residence at The College of the Holy Cross.