Speranza
I love this music! It is such a lively party of music and of passion.
One problem is that when I downloaded the music, it played with the first track of the first CD, followed by the first track of the second CD, followed by the second track of the first CD, giving it a REALLY discordant sound that had me about ready to throw the MP3 player across the room.
But, if you can rearrange it yourself, it's pretty good.
Such a 2000 creation is a real chalice of bliss and joy.
The subject is as old as our civilization.
It is also one of the most interesting works by J.S. Bach.
And yet we are confronted to a complete renewal, an absolute regeneration that our overlistening to and over-performing of Bach's Passions, and among others Mark's, had more or less convinced our cultural consciousness was impossible.
This new creative power had to come from a completely different planet, hemisphere, continent and it had to be the highly creatively christian America.
The composer, Osvaldo Golijov, uses all the musical resources he can have at his disposal in his own country.
You will find the voices surprising because they do not qualify entirely the strict definitions we are used to.
Pilate's thinking about the deep injustice he is about to commit, the long walk Jesus is going to take up to Golgotha, the everlasting sense of guilt that those who required and obtained Jesus' crucifixion will carry for centuries, the long processions we have taken part in and will take part in over the years to celebrate or simply remember the horror of a past that is eternally recurring and coming back among us, because our true and everlasting impulse or instinct is to survive no matter what, to dominate no matter what and to protect our power no matter what, even if we need to assassinate innocents or have them assassinated by the police, some armed forces or even some criminals who try to cultivate the barbaric frustrations that they have suffered by imposing some just as barbaric violence onto others.
The first most surprising moment of this Passion is Judas' Aria, that does not express remorse but regret, the regret not to have reached the full and complete truth and the wish he could come back in this life to learn some more.
Did he betray as it is repetitively said, or was he the victim of some illusion about truth and the fuiture, or was he expected to do this without really understanding why?
There is at this moment, including in the music a depth that reveals Judas is probably not the traitor and criminal we see most of the time under his name.
The second most surprising moment is of course the final Kaddish, the Jewish prayer to the Dead, which is in Aramaic, the common language of Jesus, his disciples and the Jews at the time.
This ending with the Jewish reference and atmosphere shows how the drama of Jesus is not to have been crucified on the request of the Jewish high priests manipulating the populace, but the tragic crucifixion of a Jew by other Jews hence producing the deepest subversive frustration among Jews that will lead eventually to a secession of one group from the other and millenia-long hostility, rivalry and hatred. There is nothing more tragic than a feud among brothers and sisters.
Osvaldo Golijov is rapidly becoming one of the exciting new composers of classical music and while he has not joined the upper echelon of John Adams, Steve Reich, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Magnus Lindberg, Thomas Adès, Phillip Glass et al, he continues to grow in importance.
His recent reworking of his opera 'Ainadamar' currently satisfying critics and audiences alike at the Santa Fe Opera demonstrates how he is a composer whose creativity seems boundless.
His chamber works are exceptionally interesting and he owns one major benefit for public adoration: his music is not only well crafted, it is accessible!
'Il vangelo secondo Marco' is the result of the challenge of new works for the millennium and while Golijov produced a unique setting of the Passion the work is not wholly successful as a composition.
Without question Golijov understands how to weave seemingly disparate types of music and verse and form a means of communication that goes beyond the expected telling of the crucifixion.
His orchestration is vivid, highly percussive, and pliant to the inclusion of voice both in chorus and solo.
The problem with the work as whole (and the Passione is 86 minutes in length) is a sameness to the different 'movements'.
Other composers in this so-called 'minimalist' vein allow repetition of like notes and words to gradually mutate and form a greater 'big idea' (John Adams' Harmonium is an example).
Perhaps it is in keeping with the composer's obvious love of the pulsating rhythms that traditionally merge into the night in the countries of South America that he disdains altering an initial thought.
But here, while the work is never less than interesting, it borders on excess.
There are some plangent moments that break this rhythmic monotony, but they are few (not unlike Tan Dun's similar 'Water Passion').
The recording is taken from a live performance and while that adds to the thrust of the work's impetus, the sound is somewhat distant and, in being so, loses clarity.
Maria Guinand conducts the forces with great attention to detail and the solo voices are committed and maintain the energy of the work. Time will tell whether this Pasion will join the orchestral/choral repertoire.
The theme and lyrics of these songs very often are about profound pain and loss.
This may me a requiered adjustment in some listeners.
To some ears, Golijov's *Vangelo* is a multilevel grand flop.
Golijov's play of forms never jells: the parts don't add up to any grander whole.
The quieter sections are often haunting -- even quite wonderful.
But in the larger noisier sections, the Passion becomes a trivial nightclub act. And for this story, that's just not good enough.
There are many ways to bring new life to beloved sacred texts.
Golijov's method just happens not to work. One could say, for example, that in letting both individual singers and the chorus intone the role of Jesus, Golijov is suggesting Christ's gender-free universality.
But practically speaking, this tactic diffuses his identity to the point that he has no clear musical profile.
He's not a person at all but an expedient of the compositional moment: Jesus becomes whatever the composer needs to get to the next section.
Thus, Golijov's Christ is virtually all externally applied effect.
Nothing seems to emerge from the inner demands of Jesus's character.
Golijov isn't tuned in on that level. Much of the music seems to have been imposed upon the subject instead of having emerged organically from an inner communion between subject and creator. As a result, Golijov's Jesus is a cipher whose fate inspires indifference.
Dramaturgically, the result is disastrous: this great and powerful story does not move me one bit in Golijov's (mis)handling.
By ear alone, one never knows who's who in the drama. And Passions are first and foremost meant to be heard and understood by the congregational ear.
Surely, most of Bach's listeners could not read.
But they could hear and follow the drama because he had deployed and delineated the characters as clearly as if they were on an operatic stage.
In a way, the less you know about the text, the better. As soon as you start examining the text and the character of the music supporting it, you rarely find any compelling, discernible reason for the composer's having chosen *this* musical dress over any other.
Something like this happens in Rossini's *Stabat Mater*, but Rossini is working in a more homogeneous style that makes it all easier to swallow.
One could say much the same about Stravinsky's *Symphony of Psalms*, in which Igor deliberately resists word-painting. But the work generates an atmosphere of transcendence in a way that Golijov's *Pasión* never approaches.
And if you can't generate transcendence for one of spiritual history's grandest transcendent moments (whose symbolic significance you need not be Christian to appreciate [witness Tan Dun's *Water Passion*, for starters]), you're way out of your depth, and you've wasted our time.
Basically, Golijov's *Pasión* is populism run amok, a triumph of style over substance.
Some reviewers have justly compared aspects of this style to Orff's in *Carmina Burana*.
The critical difference is that Orff's approach fits: he is setting bawdy medieval texts; and the raw, rhythmic, Technicolor thrust of his music serves that end to perfection. In Golijov, the same stylistic elements (and then some) make few apt connections to the story and for the most part neither advance nor illuminate the narrative. He simply hurls buckets of Americana over everything. The result is a mess of undisciplined emotion.
I get no overarching sense of musical structure from this work -- nothing that subliminally drives me to an overwhelming conclusion or sense of participation in Jesus's extraordinary fate.
Golijov's is thus the weakest of the four Passion 2000 works.
Oh, it's very exciting and colorful and all, and it must be a blast to perform.
But it doesn't forge any consistently deep emotional connections with the subject.
It is woefully deficient in majesty and awe.
Frankly, I quickly lost patience with the whole thing and often couldn't wait for it to be over.
The New Yorker's Alex Ross thinks Golijov is the savior of "new music."
Golijov's take on the St. Mark Passion is undoubtedly going to be the best seller of the four works in the Passion 2000 project.
It's infectious,
politically correct
and quite easy on the ears.
But for all it's pleasant sonic qualities, it lacks some essential things that a setting of the passion story should have, drama and depth.
Golijov is a talented eclectic...a true post-modern composer.
Born of mixed Jewish-atheist parentage and raised in Argentina, Golijov is a pomo dream.
He has more cultures to naturally draw from than many other composers.
Through his American roots he can draw on Africa and Spain, and also Klezmer and Sephardic music.
The score to the Saint Mark Passion draws on all of this.
The work is expertly crafted.
Golijov writes like a skilled arranger, with a great ear for adding choral textures to his latin band orchestrations.
But all of this is better in the small chunks than as an actual Passion.
The stylistic chunks are undigested. Golijov doesn't take these styles and rethink them...translate them into his own language.
Rather, he has no "original language" and so the sections of the passion sound more like an anthropological recording, or the famous Missa Luba recording from the Congo, than a unified work in a grand western tradition.
Also, the broad, dramatic arc of the Passion story is somehow lost underneath the bewildering hogepodge.
You get very little sense of the darkness of this story.
Too often it sounds like a fiesta rather than a somber meditation on the central Christian mystery.
If you like American music, this is certainly an interesting CD. However, I would suggest any number of recordings by Tito Puente or Celia Cruz over the material here.
If you like African based chant, I would suggest any number of CDs of capoeira music or music from Camendoble rituals.
The point is, that, though this work is fun and well drafted, Golijov neither adds anything interesting to his source material or to the Passion tradition.
As a result, I just don't think this is a CD that I can recommend.
Okay, I just had to do it. I read so much (mostly positive) about this work from reviewers whose opinions I usually respect that I figured I would give the discs a spin in my CD player. The first thing to be said is that (thankfully) it was not what I expected. What I expected was a mish-mosh of musical styles whose roots should never have yielded anything as substantial as "styles," blended for maximum impact and sounding like the score for a grade B movie. Instead what I heard was a sincere (and I must stress that word) utterance that tells a lofty story in a remarkably unaffected way. In spite of everything I'd read about this work, I heard no striving for effect: neither a lofty intellectualism nor a direct appeal to the gut. In short, if I may sound so boorish, it isn't Schoenberg but it isn't Yanni, either. It may not be the masterpiece I believe Gubaidulina's similarly commissioned St. John Passion to be, but it is chock full of strange and wonderful things. Although it is stylistically diverse, the heterogenous elements cohere. The different movements are like the various booths at a carnival, yet it's all to the composer's credit that we know throughout the work that we're still in the same fairgrounds.
The performance is terrific, with special praise going to the male vocal soloist (sorry, but I can't tell who he is from the program book). The sound is fine, if a bit less "forward" than the music would seem to call for, but better this sense of realism than in-your-face vulgarity.
I'll end by saying that each time I listen to this piece I find more to admire both emotionally and intellectually. And considering that I started with a fairly high level of appreciation, that's saying a lot.
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing composition and fusion, November 13, 2002
By Sean Francisco Smith "New York Jazz MythMaker" (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME) This review is from: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) (Audio CD)
It's interesting to see the reviews here as they vary between the extreme poles of love or hate. My vote is with the former, I loved it. I bought this CD immediately after seeing the live concert, and I find it faithful to the spirit of that performance. My only complaint is that the volume on the recording seems to be low.
Golijov pulled off an incredible feat, there are a lot of failed attempts to combine the western classical idiom with other cultures, but here is a great case where it worked amazingly well. It is not Enrio Morricone as some have said here- it is much better and more complex in its use of local motifs. Neither is it Bach, because the composer is creating a Pasion for Latin America and attempting to represent modern Latin America's approach to Christian spirituality.
The composer is Argentinian and I think that's a key reason why his incorporation of Latin music works perfectly. The Cuban rumba, Venezuelan chorus and caporeraian chants worked well and matched the parts of the story they narrated. the operatic soprano for the Eucharist was an amazing touch, highlighted by its absence until this point.
Finally, I can speak for the audiences reaction when we watched this piece, at the end of performance, the Chorus, a group from Caracas Venezuela waved happily to the audience, which was giving them a standing ovation at the time. They then spontaneously began singing a standard sapnish hymn "no mas amor", and the several members that new the song sang back. I have never scene such a personal and emotional connection between performer and audience for any modern classical performance.
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3 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Jesus Christ Super Estrella, October 4, 2002
By Haeloxspace "itsjustchris" (Morristown, NJ United States) - See all my reviewsAmazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) (Audio CD)
Some beautiful moments, but...
Latin popular music done up in the classical tradition comes off as a conceit, and the staginess of the choral parts feels oddly enthusiastic. "Hey, let's put on a show" rings false here somehow.
of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Jesus Christ Super Estrella, October 4, 2002
By Haeloxspace "itsjustchris" (Morristown, NJ United States) - See all my reviewsAmazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) (Audio CD)
Some beautiful moments, but...
Latin popular music done up in the classical tradition comes off as a conceit, and the staginess of the choral parts feels oddly enthusiastic. "Hey, let's put on a show" rings false here somehow.
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12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent piece, excellent performance., March 8, 2002
By Patrick Dwiggins (Takoma Park, MD United States) - See all my reviewsThis review is from: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) (Audio CD)
Yes, this piece is very different from the Western European tradition of St. Mark's passion.
Osvlado Golijov (born in Argentina) creates a wonderful harmony of Western passion tradition with latin music style. It is trully 'ear-opening' experience.
In fact, I've never heard of anything quite like it: a very large chorus singing with the constant rythmic variations by various percussions. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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18 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Dreadful!, December 31, 2001
By A Customer
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) (Audio CD)
This tops my list of worst recording of 2001. At first I thought they had packaged the wrong CD's in the box!
Ersatz Ennio Morricone.
A shapeless meandering work that has little (as far as I can tell) to do with the Passion text.
I liked Golijov's few pieces for the Kronos....
Suprised to see this on Hanssler, as their Bach set with Trevor Pinnock (Partitas)is such a winner.
The only thing positive I can add is that Amazon offers the 2 disc set for the price of one CD (at least I did not throw out twice as much $)! Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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74 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent performance of a major new work, November 28, 2001
By Vincent Lau - See all my reviewsThis review is from: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) (Audio CD)
To those who are accustomed to the Passion being retold in the European classical music idiom, Osvaldo Golijov's "La Pasion Segun San Marcos" (St Mark Passion), composed as part of the Passion 2000 Project, would sound extremely exotic and even folkloristic. Indeed, the music may make one recall scenes of celebration in the streets and squares of Latin America than the sombre and spiritual biblical episodes which we are taught at school. Yet, once the listener is prepared to cast aside musical and cultural prejudices, this colourful and musically wide-ranging work is actually most riveting and, in its own unique way, serve the Passion story very well.
Golijov's 85 minute work is a collage of the music of South America, Cuba, Europe and Jewish tradition. Percussion plays a paramount role in the music, which exhibits a wide array of rhythms (including, for example, flamenco and rumba). There are also delightful uses of the Brazilian drums and bow as well as the accordion alongside music instruments of the European classical tradition like the violin, cello, double-bass and trumpet. While the music is often efferverscent and folklorish (though certainly not simplistic), it can also become introspective, mournful, achingly lyrical (as in the haunting aria "Agonia") or delicately impressionistic (as in "In Gethsemane"). There's also some mesmerising rippling effect a la Steve Reich, which sounds even more interesting (and harmonious) when used against a Latin American soundscape. As some of the reviews of the first performance put it, it is a magnificent triumph of Latin American music.
The various roles in the Passion are not definitively assigned and they may speak (in Spanish, save and except the Kaddish finale) through the chorus or the soloists. They are wonderfully and idiomatically performed here by Reynaldo Gonazalez Fernandez, Samia Ibrahim and, above all, the versatile and vocally charimatic Luciana Souza. The Venezualian choir, Schola Cantorum de Caracas, and the Cantoria Alberto Grau sing with commitment and energy. The Orguesta La Pasion, directed by Maria Guinand and anchored by the brilliant percussionist Mikael Ringquist, unified the different stylistic roots of the music into a coherent and delightful whole.
The recording, made live during the world premiere of the work in Stuttgart ...(but with the applause edited out), is well-balanced and the booklet which accompanies the 2 CD set contains the full libretto in 4 languages, a short article about the Passion 2000 Project as well as an extended interview with Golijov plus some notes by the composer. This work, a major addition to the repertoire, has here received an excellent performance and presentation. Do give it a try! It may open up new musical horizons for you.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Pason Segun San Marcos, November 19, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) (Audio CD)
The music world is so fortunate to have a giant composer of the magnitute of Osvaldo Golijov in its midst. His Pasion Segun San Marcos is unique, provocative and exotic in that it combines his own multicultural Jewish and Latin roots and extends even further to African and Carribian elements. The first time I heard this piece, I was so rivited and stirred both emotionally and musically by this musical giant who knows how to listen with his ears, and also feel very deeply with the heart and soul. Be ready to tap your feet, move your head and envelope your heart with this work. Bravo Mr. Golijov! Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Pason Segun San Marcos, November 19, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion) (Audio CD)
The music world is so fortunate to have a giant composer of the magnitute of Osvaldo Golijov in its midst. His Pasion Segun San Marcos is unique, provocative and exotic in that it combines his own multicultural Jewish and Latin roots and extends even further to African and Carribian elements. The first time I heard this piece, I was so rivited and stirred both emotionally and musically by this musical giant who knows how to listen with his ears, and also feel very deeply with the heart and soul. Be ready to tap your feet, move your head and envelope your heart with this work. Bravo Mr. Golijov! Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
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