Even before you get to hear Osvaldo Golijov's La Pasión según San Marcos for yourself, the hype is all but inescapable. On its American premiere, Alex Ross of The New Yorker praised its “revolutionary air, as if musical history were starting over”, and The Boston Globe described it as “the first indisputably great composition of the 21st century.”
I’m not convinced. Golijov’s reinvention of the Passion format is undeniably exciting, with Christ’s sufferings reimagined in Latin-American forms as though it’s a Passion taking place in the barrios of Cuba or Brazil rather than first century Palestine. Its rhythmic vitality is terrifically powerful, and its use of Latin-American artists to play the characters sends a powerful message about the universality of Jesus’ story.
But I had never been swept away by it. Perhaps that’s because, as a white westerner, I’m far removed from the musical world that Golijov creates (which rather makes his point about universality), and a lot of his effects I find distancing rather than involving. Nor does it help that, ironically, La Pasión según San Marcos doesn’t feel like a particularly Christian work. Instead it places a stress on the humanity of Jesus and the cruelty of his sufferings, more a meditation on man’s inhumanity to man, and the few explicit references to God, such as the Psalm of thanksgiving before Gethsemane, seem disconnected from the dramatic flow of the rest of the work.
Maybe I just needed to see it because, watching this performance at the opening of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, I got my first taste of what its admirers find so compelling. The visual aspect matters, and I don’t just mean the dances or the dramatic re-enactment of the crucifixion. No, much more compelling was the acting of the chorus. The life blood of this concert was the National Youth Choir of Scotland, who not only sang with full-blooded passion and incisive bite – as well as convincing Latin-Spanish – but they threw themselves into acting their parts with terrific energy. Some of the recriminations and shoulder-waggling were a bit much, but their determination to take the direction seriously brought out much of the drama in Golijov’s structure. I suspect that several other choruses might not have gone along with it so enthusiastically.
Alongside them the voices of the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela sang the minor parts with a raw directness that made it sound as though they were plugged into the mainframe. The solo vocalists all brought authority to their parts too, most magically the soprano Sophia Burgos, whose aria of Peter’s tears was sung with the heartfelt intensity that made it the still centre of the work.
Conductor Joana Carneiro shaped the piece with remarkable clarity, not least because she had at her disposal a first rate group of musicians, including a team from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. For the second summer in a row they have opened the EIF with a Passion setting that is outside of the western European norm, a long way from their familiar material, and it’s to their credit that they not only attempted it but carried it off with such confidence.
I still harbour plenty of doubts, not least the work’s uncomfortable pacing: several of the crowd scenes are far too long, and the hefty percussion passage around Christ’s sentencing feels prolonged beyond what’s good for it. Still, it’s a bold choice with which to open the EIF, and if the objective was to broaden the audience’s musical perspectives then it worked, even for a sceptic like me.
