Osvaldo Golijov truly has a distinctive ability to transcend
musical boundaries. As this season’s holder of the Richard
and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall,
his largest project within his residency is yet
to come:La Pasión según San Marcos, live at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, March 10.
Golijov’s oratorio combines the classical
influences of Mahler and Beethoven with a direct reflection
of what it means to write music in today’s multicultural
landscape.
Osvaldo Golijov in conversation with Carnegie Hall’s Director of Artistic Planning Jeremy Geffen
For those who may not be familiar with the work, explain how La Pasión según San Marcos differs from other retellings of the Passion.
La Pasión is an attempt to tell the
story of the Passion as it is lived
and felt in Latin America, more
specifically in the areas of Latin
America influenced by the cultures
of Cuba and the northeastern part
of Brazil. These are geographic and
cultural and musical places that have
syncretized colliding cultures, such
as the Yoruba (the African culture
that was brought by the people who
came enslaved to the Americas), the
native cultures of those locales, and
the colonizers from Portugal and
Spain. Because the message of the
Passion story is universal, it remains
intact, but it has been adapted in a
very profound way in these places.
What I have tried to do is present
this other view of the truth. If the
Passion were a painting, it would
be the crucifixion, of course. In the
same way that out of the thousands
of crucifixion paintings emerged
Dalí’s interpretation, or Picasso’s
wilder view of that moment, La
Pasión musically presents a different
perspective of something that was
familiar and had a tradition inherent
in its storytelling.
For those who are used to hearing Passions by Bach, La Pasión is much more ecstatic. It has the introversion of Bach in places, but its spectrum is incredibly dynamic.
The idea of La Pasión (like the other
three Passions that were composed
in 2000 for Bach’s anniversary) was
to show how this story has in many ways changed in Latin America, while
also preserving its original meaning.
In Latin America, for instance,
dancing is as spiritual as singing an
aria is in Italy, so this Passion includes
dance. The same is true for chanting
and drumming. Just as Bach worked
with Lutheran chorales, I worked
with musical roots that were already
there, present, and associated with
the returning or reenactment of the
Passion story in Latin America.
As part of this project at Carnegie Hall, you are reunited with two great colleagues and champions
of your works—Robert Spano and María Guinand. When did you first work with Spano?
I met Robert when I was a student
at Tanglewood in 1990 and he was
assisting Seiji Ozawa at the Boston
Symphony. We became friends, but we
never collaborated until La Pasión 10
years later. To me, the most beautiful
thing about collaborating with him
is that there’s absolutely no need to
speak. We talk about everything except
the music because he understands
it better than I do—and this is why
I have worked with him on nearly
everything I’ve written that involves
an orchestra. And, like María, he found
a language—a repertory of gestures—
and a function to the conductor that
is necessary in La Pasión, which is
absolutely different from the function
of the conductor in other classical
works. He has to sometimes just let
things happen, because there are many
areas of La Pasión that work on their
own as a human machine, and the
conductor sometimes has to intervene
and sometimes not. I had no idea how
this thing would be conducted, but
Robert found a way.
And what about the Schola
Cantorum de Venezuela’s director
María Guinand?
I first encountered María in 1996,
when I wrote a piece called Oceana.
When I accepted the commission
for La Pasión, it was conditional that
María and the Schola do it, because
I knew it would not happen without
them. María gave birth to La Pasión,
in a way, because we worked on it for
so many months, and she shaped it
together with me and the chorus.
There’s an accepted style of singing
in the Western canon, from which
La Pasión differs. Can you explain
why that departure is so important
to this piece?
Singing is the fundamental musical
expression that we all share. Some of
us sing in the shower and others of us
sing professionally. When it comes
to classical music and choral singing,
there are rules and so forth, and of
course they work very well. But then
there are styles of singing that don’t
come from those standardized rules
but are essential to using the voice
as an instrument. We could think,
for instance of Russian singing, like
hearing Mussorgsky’s opera Boris
Godunov sung by a Russian chorus in
Russian. Throats carry a certain DNA,
and with it a cultural truth. In a similar
way, the Schola Cantorum is able to
adhere to the standard rules of singing,
but also liberate itself from those rules
when necessary, to present that truth
of certain Latin American repertory.
But in La Pasión, we are not singing
in ways that damage the voice. We are
not asking for anything that is strange
just for strangeness’s sake. Every vocal
demand that comes in La Pasión comes
from a spiritual need and a musical truth.
10
For this performance, New York
City high school students are
joining members of the Schola
Cantorum de Venezuela. Is this the
next step for the piece?
I hope so. For me, this is the highest
point—the point in which your music
becomes part of the culture through
young people. To imagine that all of
these high school students will be
singing La Pasión is more moving than
anything else I could imagine, more
than the most prestigious soloists and
the most prestigious orchestra. That
there exists a music that could become
part of the culture is really as much as I
can aspire to as a composer.
Related:
March 10, La Pasión según San Marcos
Creative Learning Projects
Maria Guinand and Pasión según San Marcos: ''You Need to Live It in Your Skin''