The playbill for each performance of Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre begins with a quote from Edward Said's Reflections on Exile: "Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimension...."
It is this concept of "simultaneous dimensions" that so aptly describes both artists and the piece as a whole. Golijov himself has known many different locations, and Ayre is a beautiful, frenzied chronicle of each of his periods of exile.
Osvaldo grew up in an Argentina-transplanted, Eastern-European Jewish family. His mother, a piano teacher, and his father, a physicist, filled the household with "chamber classical music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music and the new tango of Astor Piazzolla," as his Web site says.
Golijov followed his mother's example and studied piano at the La Plata conservatory until 1983, when he moved to Israel to study at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy.
"As I became an adult and lived in Jerusalem, I got to know all different types of music-Arabic music and later North African music. It's like with everybody, music is like life," Golijov said.
The piece was commissioned by Carnegie Hall for world-renowned American soprano Dawn Upshaw. As the story goes, Golijov was suggested to her by the Kronos Quartet, with whom he had collaborated on numerous occasions.
"She was looking for a new piece to commission, and the Kronos Quartet said, 'Check out this guy,'" Golijov said. They have been collaborating ever since, from his first piece for her, Lua Descolorida in 1999, to Golijov's first opera, Ainadamar, in 2003.
"The piece was commissioned for her and, in fact, I don't think that anybody else can do it; what she's doing is stretching what a soprano is. She is the voice of the air, she is the voice of the planet and I think it is such a great artistry that allows her to go places that no classical singer has gone before," Golijov said.
Golijov's Ayre (pronounced ai-reh) means "air" or "melody" in medieval Spanish, and centers on the religious atmosphere in southern Spain-an intermingling of Christian, Jewish and Arab cultures before the 15th-century expulsion of the Jews. The pieces are in Ladino, Arabic, Hebrew, Sardinian and Spanish and feature original music written by Golijov to accompany songs and poems from all cultures including traditional Sephardic hymns, contemporary Palestinian poetry, Christian Arab hymns and pieces written by his friend and collaborator Gustavo Santaolalla. In each piece, Dawn Upshaw's soprano contorts to fit the role she is being asked to play, including mystical sighing and tremolo in the Sephardic romance "Ariadna and su Laberinto," biting and mocking in "Tancas Serradas a muru" and both pained and graceful in the spoken poem "Be a String, Water, to My Guitar."
Though some of these songs are based on ancient texts, their combined message is still tremendously relevant in today's world. Also included in Ayre is Luciano Berio's Folk Songs, a work for which it was originally written to accompany. In Golijov's view, it is this striking similarity that may have lead to such reviews of Ayre as both "ecstatically beautiful" and "radical and disorienting" by the New York Times.
"I don't set up to do something radical," Golijov said. "I think that in this particular case these texts that were written 500 years ago are the same problems we face today, war between civilizations. In order to use those texts you have to re-imagine them in a way that is not just a museum piece. Making the ancient past present and vital and wrenching again might be the way that it is called radical."
Ayre will be performed at Page Auditorium Saturday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. Tickets for students are $5.
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