Oh, the comparisons

The talk about him and Mozart began innocently enough, as a midsummer joke.

Osvaldo Golijov was at the annual music festival on Cape Cod for a performance of his “The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind.” When the players finished it, they beckoned him onto the stage of the Brewster Baptist Church to share the audience’s standing ovation, a form of ego stroking the 41-year-old composer has had to get used to of late.

If there was any danger of it going to his head, his family was there to make sure it didn’t.

Before the concert, his wife kidded him about a feature in the local newspaper that said it took “the devotion of a saint” to produce works like his. Silvia Golijov said, “Yeah, devotion of a saint wife.”

Two of his children got him next. When the Borromeo String Quartet launched into Golijov’s musical interpretation of Jewish prayer, 7-year-old Anna curled onto her mom’s lap -- and fell asleep. Brother Yoni, 12, at least pretended to pay attention to the music, in which his dad asks the performers to imagine themselves “shivering before God.” But five minutes in, Yoni closed his eyes and slumped forward in feigned slumber. Papa nudged him in the ribs, and up he popped.

The musicians did their part, as well, as soon as they concluded the concert with a chorus singing the sublime “Ave Verum Corpus,” a three-minute work that Mozart wrote in the last months of his life. Backstage, as they packed their instruments, Golijov set himself up by gushing how “one concert that would be really great would be to play the ‘Ave Verum’ 10 times--just the ‘Ave Verum.’ ”

The evening’s soloist, clarinetist Todd Palmer, grabbed him by the shoulders and laughed.

“Ozzie, even if you do get great someday,” he said, “you’ll never be as great as Mozart.”

“You have to know you’re gonna die!” Golijov protested. “Then it’s easy!”

And that was it, a little jesting among friends, until a couple of weeks later, when someone else used Golijov’s name in the same sentence with Mozart’s ... and this time they weren’t joking.

Perhaps a baseball player would be flattered to be called the next Babe Ruth, or an artist the new Picasso.

What Golijov said then was, “That’s very stupid.”

One work changed it all

The burden of such comparisons was hardly one of Osvaldo Golijov’s worries two years ago, when he was the least known of four composers who had been asked to produce Passions to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. Though he had a following in chamber music circles for his intense string pieces, Golijov was well off the radar screen of the public and had never produced a full concert-length work, much less anything like Bach’s stirring Passions based on the Gospels of Matthew and John.

But they wanted a diversity of voices for the Bach celebration, and he was a good bet to provide that, a Jew from Argentina raised on the classics and tango alike before settling in a Boston suburb -- and a member of the generation of young composers not tied to any musical “ism” except eclecticism.

Golijov gave them a different Jesus indeed, not a pale European one, but a dark Latin American. He gave them different music too, in bold leaps of style and mood: a few traditional arias, sure, but mixed with rumba, flamenco, tango. And why couldn’t Jesus shake a pair of maracas as he crossed the stage? Why couldn’t his persecutors push him along the road to crucifixion with dance-like Brazilian martial arts, including a twirling kick to the face?

When “La Pasion Segun San Marcos” debuted in Stuttgart in September 2000, it was hard to tell how all this was going over. The German audience sat silently for an hour and a half and, despite the intense Latin rhythms, not a head was seen to bob, or a foot tap. Then the music ended, and they cheered for 20 minutes. Five months later, the North American premiere set off pandemonium again.

By this summer, Golijov’s Passion still had been performed only a handful of times and had been seen by fewer people than go to a single Bruce Springsteen show. But that was enough to gain it a page full of critics’ blurbs like those normally found in blaring movie ads: “the first indisputably great composition of the 21st century,” “genius,” “timeless.” The New Yorker said the piece had “a revolutionary air, as if musical history were starting over.”

That buzz was in the air when Golijov embarked this year on what was, in essence, a six-month victory lap. The Passion would not be performed until the end, at the Tanglewood Music Festival here in the Berkshires, setting the stage for its New York and West Coast premieres, the latter Friday and Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Before that, Golijov was composer-in-residence everywhere you turned, unveiling smaller works from an imagination seemingly expanding by the moment.

He was in Minneapolis in March, with songs for soprano Dawn Upshaw, drawn from poems of Emily Dickinson. Then in New York, with a piece inspired by something film director Federico Fellini once said about using light to make reality disappear. He composed a tone poem for an art film about the Sept. 11 attacks, and a piece for South Carolina’s Spoleto Festival, this one prompted by two experiences of his own: a trip to Israel, as the suicide bombings began again, and a visit with his son to a planetarium, where the Earth became, from space, “a little blue dot.” He tried to capture both realities with music that “never touched ground.”

He might have ended the road trip after Vermont’s renowned Marlboro Festival, and passed up the low-key Cape event, where opening night meant 292 people in a church with a noisy air conditioner. But that was an opportunity to give the family an August holiday on a picture-postcard inlet. Then his wife saw him running off to rehearsals and sound checks.

“You call this a vacation?” she asked.

“Sort of,” he said.

A battered car, a magazine cover

“There’s Dawn!”

Golijov rushes to get the singer, who is finishing a morning walk amid the tall pines of the Berkshires. Sixteen days after the Cape opening, we’re on the porch of a cabin near the Tanglewood festival grounds where Golijov’s Passion will be performed in the evening. But that’s not why he’s nervous.

The Boston Symphony has announced that he will compose a chamber opera for next summer’s festival here, and that the piece is being co-commissioned by Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Philharmonic -- his first major work since the St. Mark Passion. As if that isn’t enough, what subject has he picked?

“Child sacrifice in the Middle East” -- from the suicide bombers to the kids in Israeli settlements -- “if I don’t get too scared.”

As soon as Upshaw takes a seat on the porch, he asks her to join him at a Tanglewood meeting on the project. The soprano of choice for many contemporary composers, she’s a longtime member of Golijov’s second family, musical co-conspirators who come to him time and again, to write or arrange for them--the Kronos Quartet, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Mexican rockers Cafe Tacuba and even a Gypsy band, Taraf de Haidouks. Upshaw has agreed to be the star of his opera, but she’s not sure mere “talent” belongs in the Tanglewood discussion.

“Please,” he says, then drops to a whisper, “OK, if you have better things to do ... “

“Oh, no,” she says, and he has her.

Golijov heads to the kitchen to get her a glass of water, and to prepare bitter Argentine matte tea for himself. He’s in a Hawaiian shirt, jeans shorts and running shoes. He has a marathoner’s wiry build and wears his dark hair close-cropped, almost spiky. With his slit-like, wire-frame glasses, his look is nerdy cool, in the manner of Buddy Holly. After he returns with the tea, I ask why he doesn’t have flunkies bringing it, like a rock star would, now that he has been anointed the new Mozart.

When he says, “Nah, you are making that up,” it’s clear he has not seen the latest Gramophone magazine: “Osvaldo Golijov: Hailed the ‘Mozart of Our Time.’ ”

“On the cover?” Upshaw asks. “That could set him up for a big fall.”

“I know!” he says.

“No offense,” she says. “You can’t say that about anybody. It’s ridiculous.”

He parodies a moment in American political debate. “I know Mozart -- and I am no Mozart. When Mozart was writing operas at age 12, I was still cutting class in school trying to go to X-rated movies with my friends.”

On he goes. “Mozart was like Spielberg,” he decides. “There were like 5,000 composers in Vienna out of 250,000 citizens, you know? Today you have like 5,000 composers in the United States, out of 300 million people. The Mozart is a moviemaker or an Internet game designer.”

What he can’t make light of is the pressure that comes with such accolades, hype or not -- especially given his answer to the inevitable “What’s next?” Had he failed with the Passion, who would have noticed? Now he’s the new new thing, the flavor of the month, and he wants to do an hourlong opera about the most explosive spot on Earth.

“A lot of people who have success have to go through the woods, you know,” says Upshaw, who saw it happen two years ago when she was in Pulitzer Prize winner John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby” when it opened at Lincoln Center. The opera got a tremendous buildup, but it wasn’t ready for the Met spotlight.

Golijov saw what happened with John Adams’ lightning-rod opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” about the murder of a wheelchair-bound U.S. tourist by terrorists on a cruise ship. Adams hoped to develop the sensitive work in private but “had journalists from 12 countries coming for just a piano workshop,” Golijov recalls.

He could still opt for a safer topic for his chamber opera, which is scheduled to make its way to Los Angeles in February 2004, and he again urges Upshaw to go with him to the meeting with conductor Robert Spano and others.

“I’m still worried about my ability to do that,” he says. “Please come. Bring your aura.”

“I’ll wash it first,” she says.

Which means she needs to get to the house where she’s staying. We climb into Golijov’s Honda Civic with its dents, broken air conditioner and 143,000 miles.

He says, “You can put in there that Mozart is riding in a 12-year-old car that his wife refuses to ride in.”

Under the piano

If you ask Golijov where he considers himself “from” these days, he gives the musician’s answer -- it’s not about a physical place, but time, “the place of the spirit.” But it’s his personal geography that is written into the notes of his music.

He was born in 1960 in La Plata, south of Buenos Aires, to a pianist mother. The first of her four children, he was raised under her piano, where at an early age he could hear that a Bach suite wasn’t one line of music but three, “each complete and beautiful in its own right,” yet “making perfect sense together.” Before long, he was playing the organ in synagogue and performing his first composition at local schools.

His family was from Eastern Europe -- his mother’s side from Romania, his father’s from Russia -- before immigrating in the 1920s to escape anti-Semitism and poverty. His mother’s people were Orthodox Jews, and Osvaldo shared his room for a time with a great-grandfather who rose at all hours to pray by the window. Far from highbrow, the Romanian kin were a link to Gypsy and klezmer music, the sort played at old-country Jewish weddings.

His father’s people fancied themselves “big thinkers” and were devout communists -- until they saw that Stalin was a butcher.

His grandfather played chess, drank and cursed the world. His father was a doctor who loved Tchaikovsky. But when tango master Astor Piazzolla came to town, he made sure Osvaldo heard him too.

At 23, Osvaldo took off with Silvia, then his girlfriend, to study in Jerusalem, where he made ends meet by teaching exercise classes, sit-ups and all. Three years later, in 1986, he was accepted into a PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under composer George Crumb, delivered Domino’s pizza and took off a semester -- to be with his mother, back home, when she was battling cancer.

That was when he began having trouble sleeping, invariably stirring awake after a few hours, “I guess,” he says now, “to check if she was still breathing.”

He was not there at the end, though: Silvia was pregnant with their first child and they needed to be near their hospital in Philadelphia. Their daughter, Talia, was born the same week his mother died, at 58, giving him this to ponder -- how life and death come as a package.

All these years later, Golijov still cannot sleep through the night. The insomnia frustrated him at first, and he saw a shrink about it, but there was no easy cure. The man suggested he make the best of it -- if he couldn’t fall back asleep in 10 minutes, “do something productive.” That’s when he began stacking plays and poetry and essays by his bed, and using the dark hours to find inspiration for the works that now bring audiences to their feet.

Watch him at a rehearsal with a string quartet, sitting in the fourth row, looking like a wrestler giving himself a headlock, with his left arm wrapped over the top, and his right arm around the back of his neck, just listening. Finally he unwinds, and strides toward the musicians to tell them how he “just noticed” a stage direction in a Chekhov play -- from one of those 3 a.m. reading sessions, no doubt -- that speaks of “a harp string breaking loose.”

He is explaining a moment where his music goes from a joyous klezmer dance to a slow waltz and becomes, for a instant, “very, very ghostly.” He wants it to be the experience of something unexpected, that “tears you apart.”

If his mother’s death taught him the uses of the night, his father’s, at a more natural 72, reminded him never to think himself above the music of the streets.

When they discussed what his father would want to hear at the end, it was Schubert. But there was a tango CD nearby, of Anibal Troilo’s band, and when the time came, “he pointed to the Troilo. So I guess that in the last minutes it’s truly what you have in your heart, not what you plan.”

Sold-out ‘Pasion’

Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall is sold out for “La Pasion Segun San Marcos,” and the crowd is thick with cognoscenti who want to witness for themselves, or witness again, those bold leaps of style and mood. Not in the hall, however, are the three Golijov kids. “They decided to see ‘Friends,’ ” he says and shrugs when he arrives with Silvia. Someone offered them six videotaped episodes of the TV sitcom back at the cabin. How could they refuse?

Though Argentina is an officially Catholic nation, he didn’t know the New Testament well when he was asked to write the Passion. But the Gospel according to Mark wasn’t his only nighttime reading then: He studied the diaries of Che Guevara, the guerrilla fighter betrayed by those around him and gunned down in the jungles of Bolivia; he researched the Indians, who planted crucifixes with their corn to help it grow, and were burned to death for blasphemy; he discovered Bartolome de las Casas, repentant slave owner and the first Latin American ordained as a priest.

On paper, it may read like an exercise in political correctness, but that’s not what it sounds like in the auditorium, where, after a performance like tonight’s, a small crowd clusters around Silvia to exclaim how for once they experienced multiculturalism as more than a slogan. Someone else says the Passion makes other “high art” suddenly seem far too distant. Then there are those rhythms.

Though the conductor, soloists and symphony players may vary, Golijov has insisted that two groups be part of every performance to date: Orquesta la Pasion, the percussionists he has worked with from the start, and a 53-voice Venezuelan chorus, which sometimes chants as an angry mob and sometimes speaks for characters from Jesus to Judas. Other times, Jesus is Reynaldo Gonzalez Fernandez, a Cuban-born singer, dancer and percussionist.

The classical soprano, Upshaw, has only two arias. The last word goes to the chorus as God, singing to Jesus in Spanish, while Brazilian vocalist Luciana Souza performs a Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, in ancient Aramaic. The frequent frenzy of the Christian story of death and resurrection ends with the haunting reflections of Golijov’s own tradition.

After the audience does its usual thing, there’s a cast party. When Golijov enters, members of the Venezuelan chorus hold up their index fingers and chant “Para Uno! Para Uno!” The Afro-Cuban Jesus gathers the drummers. A dance line forms. Golijov makes his way to the bar to get a beer. “Enjoy. Be happy,” Upshaw tells him there. “Enjoy. At least for tonight.”

Back to work

IN September, he was back home in Newton, Mass., taking the kids to school each morning, then heading to the basement apartment in Brookline that he has converted to a studio. It was time to get back to work, alone, away from the hype.

The victory-lap bows are not all that outsiders imagine. “It’s nice, but it’s not the moment for me,” he says. “The moment is when I am at the piano.”

The walls of his studio display life at its best, with photos of the kids at play and “Welcome Home Dad!” artwork. But sitting on the piano is a page from the Lamentations of Jeremiah: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow!” He will almost certainly use that in his opera. Back on the Cape, he already had a stack of reading matter to get him thinking about the project, including books on Jerusalem and biblical sites and two volumes of librettos, seven of German composers, seven of Verdi’s. Later, he met with an Israeli father who brought coffins to the U.N. to remind the world of the children killed.

Now he has to turn the thoughts he grappled with at night into sound. It’s never easy. “All my music, even if I try to be serene and content,” he says, “it kind of leads me to scary places.”

At the start of October, he shut off his e-mail. He needed to get down notes before the next road trip, before the West Coast and New York Passions, when he would be treated again like the second coming of, if not Mozart, then perhaps, a Mussorgsky.

He insists, “I am not even a Mussorgsky.”

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On the record

The composer is also an arranger and, above all, a collaborator. To hear his music, you have to check out the fine print.

“La Pasion Segun San Marcos”

Orquesta la Pasion, two choruses, soloists including Luciana Souza, Reynaldo Gonzalez Fernandez, conductor Maria Guinand (Hanssler Classic)

The live recording, from 2000, of the world premiere of the work causing all the hoopla.

“Yiddishbbuk”/”The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind” and other works

Todd Palmer, clarinets; St. Lawrence String Quartet and other performers (EMI Classics)

An excellent introduction to various sides of Golijov.

“Night Prayers”

Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch)

This collection of string quartets from Eastern Europe includes one Golijov composition, “K’vakarat,” with Mikhail Alexandrovich, cantor.

“Caravan”

Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch)

The Kronos on the Silk Road with plenty of detours, this disc includes arrangements by Golijov of everything from surf music to a Bollywood tune.

“Nuevo”

Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch)

The 2002 Mexican music compilation includes one Golijov composition, “K’in Sventa Ch’ul Me’tik Kwadulupe” (Festival for the Holy Mother Guadalupe), and arrangements of seven other pieces.