Program Note
Osvaldo Golijov has become one of the most prominent and frequently performed composers of our time. Born in 1960 to an Eastern European Jewish family in La Plata, Argentina, Golijov was surrounded by classical chamber music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the “new tango” of Astor Piazzolla. This amalgam of influences can be heard in his work, but the originality and creativity of his voice synthesises them in unique ways. Golijov’s music is performed regularly by Robert Spano, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Dawn Upshaw, Luciana Souza, and Maya Beiser; the St. Lawrence, Kronos, and Borromeo quartets; the Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta symphony orchestras; and the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic. His collaborations continue to grow, most recently with film director Francis Ford Coppola, for whom he has written two film scores and is currently at work on a third. Ainadamar, Golijov’s opera based on the life of Federico García Lorca, won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Composition in 2006. In addition to Yellow Barn, he has been composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, Spoleto Festival USA, Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Music Alive, Marlboro, and Ravinia, among others. Golijov is Loyola Professor of Music at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he has taught since 1991. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2003.
The composer offers the following note for Yiddishbbuk:
“A broken song played on a shattered cymbalon.” Thus, writes Kafka, begins Yiddishbbuk, a collection of apocryphal psalms, which he read while living in Prague’s street of the alchemists. The only remnants of the collection are a few verses interspersed among the entries of his notebooks, and the last lines are also quoted in a letter to Milena: “No one sings as purely as those who are in the deepest hell. Theirs is the song which we confused with that of the angels.” Written in Hebrew characters and surrounded with musical notation, marks similar to those of the genuine texts, the psalms’ only other reference to their music is: “In the mode of the Babylonic Lamentations.” Based on these vestiges, these inscriptions for string quartet are an attempt to reconstruct that music. The movements of the piece bear the initials of persons commemorated in the work. The first movement commemorates three children interned by the Nazis at the Terezin: Doris Weiserova (1932-1944), Frantisek Bass (1930-1944), and Tomas Kauders (1934-1943). Their poems and drawings appear in the book “...I never saw another butterfly...”, published by the US Holocaust Museum. The second movement bears the initials of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), and the last movement the initials of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990).