A composition for the ages?

Occasionally, over the last 50 years, a piece of music has come along that both defined its time and paved the way for the future. Such a list might acknowledge how John Cage’s silent piece “4’33” “ inspired conceptual art, Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” elevated the Broadway musical, Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia” stimulated musical postmodernism and the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson “Einstein on the Beach” redefined opera.

It may be too soon yet to tell whether Osvaldo Golijov’s “La pasion segun San Marcos” will stand in such company. But this exuberant version of the St. Mark gospel certainly felt as though it might at its premiere in Stuttgart, Germany, in the summer of 2000.

Heard again Saturday night at Segerstrom Hall as part of the Ecletic Orange Festival, it felt all the more to be a breakthrough work. Were it to get enough widespread exposure, it could well do for the music of Latin America what Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” did for its literature -- namely, make the rest of the world aware of what it has been missing.

Certainly, in the few places besides Stuttgart that Golijov’s passion has thus far been performed -- Boston, Tanglewood, Caracas, Chicago -- it has caused a sensation. Audiences leap to their feet, hardly able to believe their ears, their eyes and their luck at witnessing such an inspirational performance. Critics rave with perhaps unprecedented unanimity. A live, little-publicized recording of the Stuttgart premiere available on Hanssler Classic, a small German label not widely distributed in this country, gets snapped up whenever our local record chains bother to stock it.

So great is the interest in this work that had a bomb dropped on the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Saturday there would be few left in Los Angeles to run its major musical institutions.

So, what is it about a “Passion According to St. Mark,” written by an Argentine Jew now living and teaching in the Boston area, that can make the retelling of Christ’s last days seem so original, so modern, so meaningful, so relevant, so universal? The key to this work’s great sway over a listener is, I think, its authenticity and complete lack of pretense. Golijov responds to Mark’s narrative as both an outsider and insider. As a Jew, he comes to the gospel fresh, but not naive, having grown up in a Catholic country and having also lived in Jerusalem, where he studied music. He responds to Mark’s narrative personally, using his native Spanish and the musical means of expression that are natural for him. He also trusts some truly remarkable performers.

Golijov’s Jesus is Latin, dark-skinned and a man of the people -- a harsh people who lived in harsh times. Golijov’s resources roam Latin music. Brass and the large percussion contingent riotously evoke recent Cuban salsa, as well as the Tito Puente of the ‘50s. Astor Piazzolla’s accordion is on hand. The brilliant singers that Golijov relies on in the Venezuelan chorus, the Schola Cantorum de Caracas, seem to be masters of just about any style the composer throws at them, from riveting ritual chanting to clapping out flamenco rhythms to producing amazing sounds from deep in their throats. This is a chorus alive to the moment that sways balletically as it sings and dramatizes every note. Sextets of violins and cellos are tender when they need to be, but they also produce compellingly strange-sounding harmonics when something more unsettling is wanted.

The narrative proceeds quickly, abruptly, without transitions. There are no specific character roles for soloists or choir. We see Jesus and Peter and Judas refracted through as many different voices and movements as we do through the different musical styles. Deraldo Ferreira -- a dancer and performer on the berimbau (a primitive Brazilian musical bow with a gourd at the end) -- enacts Jesus as fisherman, a young follower of Jesus in a white sheet, and his tormentors in three awesomely graceful and acrobatic dances. Reynaldo Gonzales Fernandez, a Cuban dancer, singer and percussionist, shows the Sermon on the Mount as a street celebration. Marvelous Brazilian jazz singer Luciana Souza is the other soloist, adding a dusky, bossa nova character to all she sings, and no more movingly so as when she ends the passion with, of all things, a Kaddish, sung in Aramaic.

If this passion is all passion, expressed in drama and movement and hot rhythms, it has a heart-wrenching, sorrowful center, expressed in the tears and regret of Peter, through an iridescent aria, “Colorless Moon.” Golijov’s gorgeous, time-stopping setting of the poem by Rosalia de Castro has become a favorite of Dawn Upshaw, and it was sung here with tremulous beauty by Samia Ibrahim.

And then there is Maria Guinand, the music director of the Schola Cantorum. A Venezuelan Bach scholar, she is also a lot more. Hers is some of the most exciting conducting I have witnessed in a long time.

“La pasion segun San Marcos” provides wonderful new possibilities for breaking down barriers between cultures (Keiichi Hashimoto, the trumpet player, hot as any Cuban you will ever hear, is Japanese). It offers similar possibilities for breaking down the barriers between concert and dramatic presentation. It is an event, plain and simple, and it will be with us for a long time.