La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion)

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Osvaldo Golijov is an inspired Argentinean-Jewish composer, and his St. Mark Passion, an 86-minute, in-your-face work--drawing from African American, South American, Cuban, European, and Jewish music--is an exciting, vibrant, percussion-filled experience with the rhythmic thrust of Carl Orff. The combination of folk and traditional instruments forms a highly original whole, and his retelling of the Passion story packs an emotional as well as musical wallop. This big, "maximist" work is not lacking in tender moments, however. An aria describing Christ's agony, for instance, is as touching and somber as anything textually similar in Bach's Passions. Most of the work here is done by the chorus, but the solo voices, which are uncategorizable (i.e., not operatic, not pop, not folk--just good voices), are impressive and add to the unique flavor of this singular work. The performance was live, not studio-recorded, and the sense of occasion adds to the success of the set. Recommended for the curious and, well, passionate. --Robert Levine

New Yorker
Golijov’s Passion “Drops like a bomb on the belief that classical music is an exclusively European Art”

Album Description
Osvaldo Golijov was born on December 5, 1960, in La Plata, Argentina, and now lives in Newton, Massachusetts. The score is dedicated "To the miracle of faith in Latin America, that lives through María Guinand and the Schola Cantorum de Caracas." Osvaldo Golijov grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, a provincial capital of half a million people about fifty kilometers from Buenos Aires in officially Catholic Argentina. While on a fellowship to the Tanglewood Festival, Golijov became acquainted personally with the Kronos Quartet, who performed there in 1990 and 1992. This relationship became a central one to Golijov’s ever-increasing profile as a composer. Golijov wrote K’vakarat, which the quartet later recorded, for Kronos and cantor Misha Alexandrovich, and in 1997 Kronos and clarinetist David Krakauer recorded Golijov’s Klezmer-accented The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. When approaching the composer with the commission, Rilling encouraged Golijov draw upon his own experience—as a Jew living in an officially Catholic country; as an artist with an interest in a broadly eclectic range of style and media; as a Spanish-speaking composer of Eastern European parents, now living in the United States, and so on—in discovering a personal perspective on the twice-told (or rather four-times-told) story. The text of La Pasión Según San Marcos is composed of portions of The Gospel According to Mark, the Old Testament’s Psalms and Lamentations, and Spanish poetry. Golijov matches the pared-down, vox populi directness of St. Mark’s account in the directness of his musical idiom, particularly in his appropriation of popular Latin American folk and dance music. He uses these forms as models for individual numbers with the larger work, which itself shares much in common with the structures of the Passions of Bach. From the Steve Reichian pulsations of the opening bars, to the sultry rhythms accompanying Jesus’ betrayal to the other-worldly setting of the Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) with which the work concludes, Golijov’s score is vibrant with energy, exoticism and PASSION! ►This is the ONLY composer authorized recording with the original ensemble!◄

La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion)

La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion), Music, Osvaldo Golijov, Maria Guinand, Luciana Souza, Chamber Music & Recitals, Choral, Choral Music, Classical, Classical Music

Average customer rating:

Most inspiring and visionary

A Significant Contemporary Composer and a Challenge

A new chapter in classical music

A Grand Triumph of Style over Substance

Too ecletic without originality.

La Pasion Segun San Marcos (St. Mark Passion)

Manufacturer: Hanssler Classics
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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Nuevo

ASIN: B00005O7SX
Release Date: 2001-08-28

Tracks:

No.1: Baptism On The Cross
No.2: Dance Of The Ensnared Fisherman
No.3: First Announcement
No.4: Second Announcement
No.5: Not On The Feast Day
No.6: Two Days
No.7: The Anointment In Bethany
No.8: Why?
No.9: Aria With Crickets
No.10: The First Day
No.11&12: Judas; The Paschal Lamb
No.13: I Forswear This World
No.14: The Eucharist
No.15: We Give Thanks
No.16: On Mount Of Olives
No.17: Face To Face
No.18: In Gethsemane
No.19: Agony
No.19: Agony
No.21: Dance Of The White Sheet
No.22: Before Caiaphas

Tracks:

No.23: I Am (Confession)
No.24: Scorn And Denial
No.25: The Rending Of The Robe
No.26: Colorless Moon
No.27: Morning: Before Pilate
No.28: Silence
No.29: Sentence
No.30: Soldiers
No.31: Dance Of The Holy Purple Robes
No.32: Crucifixion
No.33: Death
No.34: Kaddish

Amazon.com

Osvaldo Golijov is an inspired Argentinean-Jewish composer, and his St. Mark Passion, an 86-minute, in-your-face work--drawing from African American, South American, Cuban, European, and Jewish music--is an exciting, vibrant, percussion-filled experience with the rhythmic thrust of Carl Orff. The combination of folk and traditional instruments forms a highly original whole, and his retelling of the Passion story packs an emotional as well as musical wallop. This big, "maximist" work is not lacking in tender moments, however. An aria describing Christ's agony, for instance, is as touching and somber as anything textually similar in Bach's Passions. Most of the work here is done by the chorus, but the solo voices, which are uncategorizable (i.e., not operatic, not pop, not folk--just good voices), are impressive and add to the unique flavor of this singular work. The performance was live, not studio-recorded, and the sense of occasion adds to the success of the set. Recommended for the curious and, well, passionate. --Robert Levine

Album Description

Osvaldo Golijov was born on December 5, 1960, in La Plata, Argentina, and now lives in Newton, Massachusetts. The score is dedicated "To the miracle of faith in Latin America, that lives through María Guinand and the Schola Cantorum de Caracas." Osvaldo Golijov grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, a provincial capital of half a million people about fifty kilometers from Buenos Aires in officially Catholic Argentina. While on a fellowship to the Tanglewood Festival, Golijov became acquainted personally with the Kronos Quartet, who performed there in 1990 and 1992. This relationship became a central one to Golijov's ever-increasing profile as a composer. Golijov wrote K'vakarat, which the quartet later recorded, for Kronos and cantor Misha Alexandrovich, and in 1997 Kronos and clarinetist David Krakauer recorded Golijov's Klezmer-accented The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. When approaching the composer with the commission, Rilling encouraged Golijov draw upon his own experience—as a Jew living in an officially Catholic country; as an artist with an interest in a broadly eclectic range of style and media; as a Spanish-speaking composer of Eastern European parents, now living in the United States, and so on—in discovering a personal perspective on the twice-told (or rather four-times-told) story. The text of La Pasión Según San Marcos is composed of portions of The Gospel According to Mark, the Old Testament's Psalms and Lamentations, and Spanish poetry. Golijov matches the pared-down, vox populi directness of St. Mark's account in the directness of his musical idiom, particularly in his appropriation of popular Latin American folk and dance music. He uses these forms as models for individual numbers with the larger work, which itself shares much in common with the structures of the Passions of Bach. From the Steve Reichian pulsations of the opening bars, to the sultry rhythms accompanying Jesus' betrayal to the other-worldly setting of the Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) with which the work concludes, Golijov's score is vibrant with energy, exoticism and PASSION! ►This is the ONLY composer authorized recording with the original ensemble!◄

Customer Reviews:

Most inspiring and visionary.......2006-03-06

Such a 2000 creation from Caracas in Venezuela 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 overperforming 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 South America. The composer, Osvaldo Golijov, uses all the musical resources he can have at his disposal in his own country to elaborate and build a new Solomon's Temple to this forever inspiring episode in our spiritual perspective. He keeps the Boaz of the Bible, of Mark, of the tradition, even taken from Bach, but he injects the Jachin of voices, instruments, rhythms, compositions from Venezuela and Latin America. Even the Spanish flamenco has been summoned to create a real festive celebration of this event. You will find the voices surprising because they do not qualify entirely the strict definitions we are used to. The sounds of Spanish are also very surprising since we have been used to listening to German or English, at times Italian and French. And when we enter the language a little bit further we find that there is a deeper involvement and even sinking in the emotional subject due to the very syntax of the language that takes us deep into the roaring stream of these sensitive events. What's most striking though is the wide use of Latin American rhythms and percussions transforming this Passion into a real throbbing spiritual and soul-like trance. Some surprising pieces actually become parabolical and symbolical in the very architecture of the whole Passion. The foot-stamping flamenco is a real gem in this work because it is so positioned that the sound of the feet become the representation of a whole set of meanings : 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 « ¡ Quisiera yo renagar... ! » 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. We can wonder and we are perfectly entitled to think that the composer was thinking of the deep divide that was and is building up in Latin America among the brothers and sisters of these peoples who have been exploited too long by colonial or semi-colonial powers. Maybe this new dimension given to this Passion is what the Christians would call a miracle, because a miracle is an unexplainable event that occurs in our minds and souls.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne

A Significant Contemporary Composer and a Challenge.......2005-08-03

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!

'La Pasion Segun San Marcos' 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 (African American, South American, Cuban, European, and Jewish) 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 Pasion 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. Perhaps if Golijov re-works the piece.... Grady Harp, August 05

A new chapter in classical music.......2004-07-28

For the ears of the only english speaking audiphiles, cante hondo, cuban son, and the offspring of the fusion of flamenco and african rythms and percussions producing the latinamerican sounds relates to fiesta and dancing, but the theme and lyrics of these songs very often are about profound pain and loss. This may me a requiered adjustment in some listeners. The evolution of the relationship between flamenco and african rythms gave place in different latitudes to the different versions of latin music. That is the musical thread of this passion: painful singing in spanish elevated by the rythms, from middle eastern motifs to the cuban son with the tango in bewteen, all well connected, with a climax of raptured but well articulated percussions. Listen.

A Grand Triumph of Style over Substance.......2003-09-15

To these ears, Golijov's *Pasión* is a multilevel grand flop -- and I say this as someone who instantly loved the Latin American folk elements of the *Missa Criolla* when I first heard it 34 years ago. 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 Latin 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.

Too ecletic without originality........2003-09-13

The New Yorker's Alex Ross thinks Golijov is the savior of "new music." He is talented indeed,and the combination of Cuban, operatic, Reichian strands is well done BUT this is too much like a combination of Carl Orff (Carmina), Reich (Tellhelliim) and Pablo Milanes. It simply does not hold up to repeated listenings.
Jon Appleton
Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music
Dartmouth College