La Pasion Segun San Marcos

...premiered in 2000 and is still maybe the greatest piece of music in the new century of any genre. The recording from Schola Cantorum Venezuela back in 2000 was rough, with bad sound, and a total revelation. These forces have now re-recorded it on its tenth anniversary, new one sounds note-perfect, captured in much better sound with new revisions Golijov made, and is kind of a dud. The seat-of-the-pants ride is no longer there.

HERE is what I wrote about La Pasion back in December:


This was the piece that made me realize I could never leave music. If [John] Adams showed us our present through the recent past [in Doctor Atomic], then Osvaldo Golijov showed us our future through the distant past. People who tell you why Golijov - and particularly this piece of his - is bad are legion. But in listing the reasons why, all they managed to articulate was exactly why this piece - and its composer - is incredible. Here is an Argentinian-Jewish classical composer living in Boston who set the Gospel According to St. Mark to music utilizing a veritable encyclopedia of Latin American popular music traditions. This piece is everything classical music is not supposed to be: vibrant, sexy, partially improvised, and stylistically diverse.

It articulates the Gospel as though Christ were a martyred liberation theologist at home on the poorest streets of Santiago. It embraces every part of the music that Jesus would have heard on those streets - from the Tango to the Samba to the Habanera to the Rumba to Bossa Nova. It displays in sound what City of God does in images - the plight and the spirit of the world's most rapidly evolving continent with pinpoint accuracy, and in the process becomes the greatest and most transformative work of choral music since Stravinsky's Les Noces.


(I still think Voices of Washington should give the Washington Premiere when we're ready.)