New York

There were two overlapping performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week. One was the long-awaited New York premiere of "La Pasion Segun San Marco" ("The Passion According to St. Mark"), a musical work by the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov. And the other was an enactment, so to speak, of the work's reputation, which had spread by word of mouth and in the media. It surfaced mightily two Sundays ago in the New York Times, where Mr. Golijov (pronounced "go-lee-ov") was hailed as an emblematic voice of our new century, the herald of a new wave of composers "who will change the way music is heard and played."
"Fasten your seat belt!" I was advised, with real excitement, by someone involved with the event, which was a co-production of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Academy's Next Wave Festival.

And certainly the piece is very nice. It's a Latin setting of the passion story, commissioned for an important Bach festival two years ago, to honor the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. (Bach, of course, wrote the most famous Passion settings in all musical history). But it's nothing like Bach. It rolls with the beat of Cuban and Brazilian percussion, blended with gutsy Latin singing by a Brazilian soloist and a chorus from Venezuela, La Schola Cantorum de Caracas. There's also Afro-Cuban dancing, dancing in Brazil's Capoeira style, classical singing by soprano Dawn Upshaw, a brass section that sounds like a Latin big band, and classical instruments, mostly cellos and violins, textured so that they sound both earthy and unearthly.
Texture, in fact, is one thing that makes the "Pasion" go. There's layered drumming, and cutting shouts from the chorus, rising, you'd swear, from somewhere deep in the earth, as the singers play the part of a crowd mocking Jesus. Then there's gentler, paler music that Ms. Upshaw sings, and a massed, uneasy drone from the cellos, when the music sounds like it's moving toward some final consolation.
This gives us a kind of collective storytelling, in which a singer might be Judas one moment and Jesus the next, where the entire chorus might turn into Jesus for awhile, and then become the crowd, or offer comments, or take over the narration. The piece is far less formal than most classical music. It touches deep and ancient roots; it's larger than the concert hall. And it got an exuberant performance, conducted with striking thrust by an otherwise thoroughly classical conductor, Robert Spano, the Brooklyn Philharmonic's music director. Ms. Upshaw sounded pallid, but otherwise the singing (and the dancing, too) was alive with conviction and excitement.

So the piece was perfectly enjoyable. But its reputation, I thought, got a little out of hand. Yes, it's a breath of fresh air for classical music. But Mr. Golijov doesn't strike me as much of a dramatist. The "Pasion" didn't build; one thing simply followed another, and nothing ever seemed larger or more important than anything else. The ending seemed too small; it wasn't long or deep enough to deliver the consolation it seemed to promise.
And Mr. Golijov doesn't quite write strong enough tunes. His style allows for them, as does his vision of a dark, Latin, populist Christ. But when the tunes came, they didn't burn their way into my heart -- and this in a piece meant to catch fire with both global and personal feeling.

Most of all, though, there's nothing in the piece that's very new. As I listened, I couldn't help making comparisons. I thought of salsa bands in full cry, Cuban, African and Brazilian groups, and the Kodo drummers of Japan, to name only a few things I've heard live; all of them have hotter rhythms. Paul Simon's "Graceland" album from 1986, blending African music with the formal structures of western pop, mixes styles more surely than Mr. Golijov, I thought, and so does Mr. Simon's Brazilian hybrid, "The Rhythm of the Saints." Both records sink more deeply into me than the "Pasion."
A traditional Brazilian passion play I saw at the Avignon festival in France a few years ago touched me more -- even its fairly simple music, in both Brazilian and churchly styles, was more affecting. Even in classical music, and, more generally, in the larger art world, these hybrids are familiar. There's Leonard Bernstein's "Mass," for instance, a big, messy theater piece premiered way back in 1971, to massive purist disapproval, no doubt because it melds, with no seams at all, Bernstein's classical and Broadway styles. Its sincerity is very much a sometime thing (it comes and goes), but Bernstein still can rise to exactly the kind of glowing, fully worked-out conclusion that Mr. Golijov misses.
And finally I thought about "The Gospel at Colonus," composed by Bob Telson and written and staged by Lee Breuer, which mixes the Sophocles Oedipus plays with a gospel church service. I saw it at the Next Wave Festival in 1983 and felt like I was flying. Nor was I alone; the piece got a joyful ovation that made the applause for Mr. Golijov sound timid.
Why didn't these pieces -- and others I could name -- sweep the classical music world, as Mr. Golijov is doing? They were ahead of their time, I'd guess, while Mr. Golijov, by contrast, comes along exactly when classical music is looking for something new. He's wonderfully sincere, and of course a welcome voice. But let's not pretend he's better -- or more revolutionary -- than he really is.

Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2002