Osvaldo Golijov

More information:
www.osvaldogolijov.com

Osvaldo Golijov was born on 5 December 1960 and grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina. Born to a piano teacher mother and physician father, Golijov was raised surrounded by chamber classical music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music and the new tango of Astor Piazzolla. After studying piano at the local conservatory and composition with Gerardo Gandini he moved to Israel in 1983, where he studied with Mark Kopytman at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy and immersed himself in the colliding musical traditions of that city. Upon moving to the United States in 1986, Golijov earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with George Crumb, and was a fellow at Tanglewood, studying with Oliver Knussen.

In the early 90s Golijov began to work closely with two string quartets, the St. Lawrence and the Kronos. Both ensembles were the earliest to project Golijov’s volatile and category-defying music in its true, full form, and continue to perform his works regularly. Kronos also expanded Golijov’s musical family through collaborations with artists such as the Romanian Gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks, the Mexican Rock group Café Tacuba, tablas virtuoso Zakir Hussain and legendary Argentine composer, guitarist and producer Gustavo Santaolalla, with whom Golijov continues to collaborate in a variety of projects. For the past decade Golijov has been inspired by the voice of Dawn Upshaw, for whom he has composed several works, including the Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, the opera Ainadamar, the cycle Ayre and a number of arrangements of popular songs.

In 2000, the premiere of Golijov’s St. Mark Passion took the music world by storm. Commissioned by Helmuth Rilling to commemorate the 250th anniversary of J. S. Bach’s death, the piece featured the Schola Cantorum of Caracas, with the Orquesta La Pasión, all conducted by Maria Guinand. For the premiere of Ayre, Golijov founded another virtuoso ensemble: The Andalucian Dogs. Together with Dawn Upshaw, they premiered the piece at Zankel Hall and recorded it for Deutsche Grammophon. The recording was released in January 2006 to great acclaim, winning a Gramophone Award in 2006 and a Grammy^® in 2007.

Golijov has received numerous commissions from major ensembles and institutions in the U.S. and Europe. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other awards. In addition to the artists mentioned above, he collaborates closely with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony, conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, vocalist Luciana Souza, cellists Maya Beiser, Yo-Yo Ma and Matt Haimovitz and percussionist Jamey Haddad; young, multi-talented musicians such as Michael Ward-Bergeman, Gonzalo Grau, Ljova and Jeremy Flower; ensembles including the Boston Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and eighth blackbird; artist Gronk, playwright David H. Hwang and director Peter Sellars, who staged a sold-out and critically acclaimed run of Ainadamar at the Santa Fe Opera in 2005.

Golijov has been composer-in-residence at the Spoleto USA Festival, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Music Alive series, Marlboro Music, Ravinia and several other festivals. In November 2005 he was named co-composer in residence, with Marc-Anthony Turnage, at the Chicago Symphony for the 2006-07 and 2007-08 seasons. Golijov is an Associate Professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where he has taught since 1991, and is also on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory.

In January and February 2006 Lincoln Center presented a festival called “The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov”, featuring multiple performances of his major works, chamber music, late nights of Tango and Klezmer and a night at the Film Society. London’s Barbican Centre also presented two evenings of his music in early 2006, and the Atlanta Symphony featured his works throughout the season. In August, his cello concerto Azul was premiered by its dedicatees Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
September 2006 saw the release of Ainadamar, recorded with Dawn Upshaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus directed by Robert Spano. The recording was highly acclaimed, winning two Grammys^® for “Best Classical Contemporary Recording” and “Best Opera Recording” in 2006, a Prix Caecilia, Brussels, in 2007 and a Record Academy Prize, Tokyo, in 2008.

Osvaldo Golijov was the first composer-in-residence of New York’s “Mostly Mozart” Festival in the summer of 2007. In July 2007, Oceana, Tenebrae and Three Songs were released by Deutsche Grammophon. Golijov’s “muse” Dawn Upshaw was praised for her “magnificent performance” (Los Angeles Times). Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Youth Without Youth, for which Golijov composed the music, was premiered at the Rome Film Festival in October 2007 and the soundtrack released on the Yellow Label.

In April 2007 his Rose of the Winds, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was premiered by them together with the Silk Road Ensemble conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya. In 2008 Golijov became the first musician to win the Vilcek Foundation Prize for the Arts. In 2009 Deutsche Grammophon released the soundtrack to Coppola’s Tetro. In March 2010, the Yellow Label releases a new recording of Pasión segun San Marcos, featuring Biella Da Costa, Jessica Rivera, Reynaldo González-Fernández, the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, the Orquesta La Pasión and Members of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, conducted by María Guinand.

Future works include a new song cycle for Emanuel Ax, Dawn Upshaw and Michael Ward-Bergeman; a new opera, commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera; a violin concerto for Leonidas Kavakos, co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berliner Philharmoniker and London Symphony, to be premiered under Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles and Simon Rattle in Berlin; a new work for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and a chamber orchestra piece commissioned by a consortium of 35 American orchestras in honor of Henry Fogel.

Osvaldo Golijov’s works are published by Ytalianna Music Publishing, represented by Boosey and Hawkes.

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Osvaldo Golijov

A decade ago the premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos “dropped like a bomb on the belief that classical music is an exclusively European art” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker)and became known as “the first indisputably great composition of the 21st Century” (Boston Globe).Deftly exploiting the popular appeal and emotional immediacy of samba, salsa, flamenco, mambo, and the elemental vigor of folk and popular motifs, Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos sets the last days of Christ amidst the streets of Latin America. On March 23rd, Deutsche Grammophon releases the first new recording of the work since the premiere in 2000. Both Golijov and the producers at DG felt it imperative to create this definitive new studio recording of La Pasión to showcase the richness of the work’s texture and its maturity over the past decade. The audio recording on two CDs is released in tandem with the DVD of a 2008 live performance from the Holland Festival conducted by Robert Spano.

National Public Radio hailed La Pasión as one of the most important records of the decade, and has referred to Golijov as “one of the most exciting, innovative and important composers working today.” Commissioned by the International Bach Academy, it bowed in 2000 in Stuttgart on the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death.

The original recording of this work, recorded live at that premiere in 2000 was an important early document of this new work, but a decade later La Pasión has, according to Golijov “acquired a certain monumentality. It has evolved from a wild beast into a coherent being; into something that is still powerful but in a more self-assured way. The important thing in doing this new recording was to show the stage of maturity the piece has reached.”

“The recording is radically different,” Golijov says, “because we know what we are doing and we know how to record all this vast array of percussion that was a blur in the first recording but now creates this rainbow of shifting colors. We also know how to record the many layers of the voices. We can really have a clear picture of what this piece is, as opposed to just a snapshot which is what we had ten years ago. Also, the performance is different. It is still visceral but grown-up. It is a piece that already exists. It is a presence; it is an entity in the world. And it sounds like that.”

On April 24 and 25, La Pasión según San Marcos will be performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of Gustavo Dudamel’s Americas and Americans Festival spotlighting music from North and South America. The performers include Orchestra La Pasión conducted by Maria Guinand, and vocalist Luciana Souza. This spring Osvaldo Golijov will be the composer in residence for the Toronto Symphony’s New Creations Festival, held February 25-March 3, 2010 while March 11-15th will bring Osvaldo Golijov’s final concerts as Composer in Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. More information at www.osvaldogolijov.com.

More information about this recording including excerpts, listening guides, video trailer and tracklist can be found at www.deutschegrammophon.com/golijov-pasion.