Last Round

Osvaldo Golijov (1960) He was the composer in residence of the CSO while I was in college. I have vague recollections of playing my music for him in Comp class... maybe it was another composer. I don't really remember. I was stoned a lot senior year. But Osvaldo Golijov is a sexy, sexy Argentinian man.

Osvaldo Golijov grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina. Born to a piano teacher mother and physician father, Golijov was raised surrounded by classical chamber music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the new tango of Astor Piazzolla. After studying piano at the local conservatory and composition with Gerardo Gandini he moved to Israel in 1983, where he studied with Mark Kopytman at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy and immersed himself in the colliding musical traditions of that city. Upon moving to the United States in 1986, Golijov earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with George Crumb, and was a fellow at Tanglewood, studying with Oliver Knussen. read more here.

I guess to really know him you have to listen to his music. He combines so many different genres of music together to make his own. I fell in love with him when I borrowed Yiddishbbuk from the Columbia College Library. I listened to the first two tracks, which happened to be Last Round, written in 1996 after Astor Piazzolla's death. It was premiered in Burmingham in October 25th by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Stefan Asbury. I liked his use of rhythm; the Latin, complex meter offbeat is there, as well as the danger of an Argentine Tango. The romance, the feeling, the heavy swoop-like movements back and forth as i envision the first movement. I dearly wished I had a score to further examine what instrument is doing what, but Golijov orchestrates so brilliantly and traditionally that it sounds like a full orchestra, not a double string quartet with a bass. Direct Piazzolla influence is evident in not only the sweeping, majestic violin of the second movement, whose vibrato could make two strangers fall madly in lust for each other, but in the eroticism tied together with the intent of this dance (supposedly, Argentine tango is supposed to be the sexiest of all the ballroom dances). Not to mention the second half of Lentissimo sounds just like Oblivion. Nontheless, the First Movement is my favorite. The extended technique (I am a fucking sucker for weird shit), without making it seem cheesy. The heavy glissandos that seem to crescendo as they get faster (and longer, somehow. Maybe that's just me glorifying it). Omigosh. And it's such a sexy bassline, a heartbeat slowly creeping up faster and faster as things get heated and absolute passion just takes over. Orgasms everywhere, and not in the slang-talk kinda way.. you can actually hear them in the first violins. I may or may not have completely ripped off Golijov's ending to Movement 1 in my sequence in Los Angeles, and I may or may not have completely ripped off the entire thing in my First String Quartet. But Stravinsky said that the best composers steal, so it looks like I'm on my merry way. This is what Osvaldo has to say about Last Round. The contrast of the two movements make more sense after reading why he composed it:

"I composed Last Round in 1996, prompted by Geoff Nuttall and Barry Shiffman. They heard a sketch of the second movement, which I had written in 1991 upon hearing the news of Piazzolla's stroke, and encouraged me to finish it and write another movement to complement it. The title is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar, the metaphor for an imaginary chance for Piazzolla's spirit to fight one more time (he used to get into fistfights throughout his life). The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneon. The first movement represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh (it is actually a fantasy over the refrain of the song 'My Beloved Buenos Aires', composed by the legendary Carlos Gardel in the 1930's). But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other, separated by the focal bass, with violins and violas standing up as in the traditional tango orchestras. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern."

Listening to: St. Lawrence String Quartet - Yiddishbbuk (2002); Bear in Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth (2009); Osvaldo Golijov - Last Round (download link) And Astor Piazzolla: http://www.piazzolla.org