Osvaldo Golijov: Ainadamar
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Free Music Notes for Osvaldo Golijov: Ainadamar
Free Music Review: Excelente!!
Hit: 5 Stars
Excelente ópera del maestro Golijov.
Es interesante el contraste de sonidos y los riesgos que corre el compositor al integrar sonidos poco convencionales en este tipo de trabajo. Ampliamente recomiendo esta obra!!!
Free Music Review: Will this colorful opera become a huge crossover hit?
Hit: 4 Stars
The excited reviews below attest to the hot buzz that Golijov's opera has created. I was present at the original Santa Fe Opera performance last summer as staged by Peter Sellars. The audience received the work less than ecstaticallyy, but I think its flaws have been overcome on CD. All the major parts are for women, with Garcia Lorca sung as a pants role. Male voices appear only briefly from two incidental characters. The tone is mournful throughout, and the tempos are almost entirely slow.
What overcomes these drawbacks are, first of all, Golijov's lavish use of tango rhythms and Spanish color; the crossover feeling is much stronger than the operatic feeling. The same was true of his rocking St. Mark Passion. Secondly, we get the immensely moving singing of Dawn Upshaw, who only seems to gain in artistry and power. Early in her career she had a huge crossover hit with the Gorecki Third Sym., and now that she is a major singer, Upshaw could carry Ainadamar to the top of the charts. It's very accessible music full of color and feeling. I am not so sure about Ainadamar's lastig value as a stage work.
Free Music Review: Superb performances, but this is music theatre of the cheapest, most pedestrian kind,
Hit: 2 Stars
I knew Golijov's music primarily from the Kronos recording of The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (with David Krakauer). That is an exhilarating experience recommended to everyone - Golijov's take on kletzmer music was imaginative and inventive; it deployed all the clichés, of course, but made a point of it and ended up with something that was genuinely moving and worthwhile. His opera Ainadamar also uses clichés - as many of them as he could possibly fit in, apparently - though this time around it is primarily Spanish but also North African influences. The problem is that in Ainadamar nothing ever amounts to or achieves anything, and the result is just an admittedly superbly performed collection of the hoariest, trite pop-opera clichés.
The title means "fountain of tears", and the story concerns the death of Federico Garcia Lorca framed by events happening long afterwards. If the music is clichéd the text and story are only barely better (well, I don't speak Spanish, so it may be the English translation which is bad for all I know). If I were to find a nice thing to say about the opera, it must be that Golijov does seem to display a certain aptitude for writing for voices, especially female ones, and a skilled hand at orchestration. Otherwise, the mix of banal pop music, broadway, flamenco and touches of Andrew Lloyd Webber (yes, it is fully tonal, but in the way the flattest pop music is tonal) rarely rises above the trite, cheap, faux-multiculturalist and hackneyed, especially since Golijov seems to have no ability (in this case) to draw musical points together into anything resembling a coherent overall whole. This is a series of tracks with an overall theme, not a through-composed opera (which would be perfectly ok, however, if any of the tracks were in any way interesting).
Now, the performances are indeed admirable, and Dawn Upshaw is sometimes almost able to convince me that this is worth hearing. O'Connor and Rivera are hardly less compelling (Montoya is a flamenco singer, and seems to do a good job as well). The women's chorus is good (if you appreciate Broadway musical choruses) and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra does a stellar job under Spano's well paced, vital and spirited direction; the sound is vivid and the booklet notes excellent. So every technical aspect were in place for this to be a riveting experience. It is a pity, then, that the musical material is so desperately thin. I also find it sad (though some people obviously disagree) that record and opera companies spend their resources on this kind of thing, and that it gets so much press, given the often overlooked operatic masterpieces or near-masterpieces that are still being written by composers such as Siegfried Matthus or Detlev Glanert. Not recommended unless you have an obsession with this kind of thing.
Free Music Review: Operatic cartoon
Hit: 2 Stars
The rhythms are exciting, some of the orchestration is clever and well-done. Listening to the CD overcomes some of the problems of a live production: achieving a balance between acoustic and amplified music, overcoming the lack of contrast (almost all women's voices) and utter lack of dramatic movement (nothing happens). The voices are good and perform the music well. Still, there is not much here for them to work with and the result is mediocre.
The music, while catchy at first, is simple, undeveloped and repetitive. The story lacks drama and movement. It is essentially a reverie on Lorca, not the man, his poetry, his sexuality, his art or politics but just some tired ahistorical cliches about freedom and fighting facism climaxing in his assassination. And just like the music, if you missed the obvious don't worry they will play it again, and again, and again.
I'm sorry there is just nothing new or interesting here. The music and story are simple cliches in a slick packaging for shallow mutli-cultural consumption. No difficult ideas to promt thought or conversation, no dissonant music to interfere with light entertainment. It would make great background music for an animated cartoon. But I expect a little more from something that aspires to call itself opera.
Free Music Review: This year's model...
Hit: 1 Stars
For at least the fourth time I have read reviews of a new Golijov piece which proclaim a great melding of cultures, an urgent communication of feeling, all galvanized by modern means into something entirely new. Once again it sounds like slightly better than run-of-the-mill exoticism combined with a sincere desire to sound sincere. It's getting old.