He talks more like an explorer than a composer. But it's precisely this worldly curiosity that defines Osvaldo Golijov as the next great hope for classical music. While some contemporary composers sharpen their pencils and retreat into academia, the 46-year-old Golijov—who has been selected as the first composer-in-residence at New York's Mostly Mozart Festival—rolls out his map, hoists the main sail, and steers a course to different musical lands. "If I go from flamenco to Strauss, then that's the geography of music I'm exploring," says the musical polyglot, his eyes dark and expressive behind rimless Tag Heuer spectacles.
Having grown up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina, Golijov is clearly at ease with this cosmopolitan philosophy. When he was young, he heard Argentina's renowned bandoneón player Astor Piazzolla performing in a hotel café. Witnessing this legend play his jazzed-up tango was a life-changing moment. "There is no other musical expression that has captured sexual provocation as well as this," Golijov says in a lilting accent. "There are certain cultures that specialize in certain feelings. If you modulate from one to the other, you reestablish a relationship with the audience."
Golijov's delight in genre-busting—he later moved to Israel, where he absorbed further musical collisions before settling in the United States two decades ago—is reflected throughout his work. He has written string quartets, song cycles, orchestral works, and oratorios. His passionate opera Ainadamar ("Fountain of Tears") won two classical Grammys this year. Mixing klezmer, tango, chamber music, and sound effects, it tells the story of martyred Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca and his muse. The enthusiasm his music generates means that Golijov, who works out of his studio in Brookline, Massachusetts, and teaches at the Boston Conservatory, is in extremely high demand these days. The Metropolitan Opera has just commissioned an opera from him for the 2010–11 season, and Hollywood beckons.
When I met Golijov recently, he was at Bard College in upstate New York rehearsing with a small ensemble, running through his score for Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth, due out this fall. The slice of music I heard (from a projected total of 80 minutes' worth) was inflected with romantic melancholy, evoking Debussy. Sure enough, Golijov has added in some unusual instruments, including a kamancheh, a Persian violin whose sad and haunting sounds, he predicts, will be all the rage once the movie opens.
Ordinarily, contemporary composers have been damned in classical circles for being accessible or, God forbid, populist. But Golijov has mostly escaped this criticism, proving he can write sophisticated compositions that speak to a general audience who aren't too enamored of, say, Schoenberg. It was the 2000 premiere of his masterful choral work La Pasión Según San Marcos ("St. Mark Passion") that moved him from "promising" to "great" composer. The music, fired up by a mix of bossa nova rhythms, Afro-Cuban chanting, and Jewish folk songs, dropped onto the classical world like a bomb: This Latin American take on the story of Jesus was fresh and sensuous, and had a groove that blew away the fustiness of the Eurocentric concert tradition. An unusually exuberant
