As much as it gestures to the 1930s and ’60s, “Ainadamar” is a throwback to the turn of the 21st century, when Golijov was among the most celebrated figures in classical music.
Born in 1960 in Argentina into a family of Eastern European Jewish descent, he also studied in Israel and came to live in the United States, and brought all those strands — old world and new; global north and south — to bear in a musical style of artful yet explosive eclecticism, incorporating tango, flamenco, rumba, klezmer, folk ballads and more.
Within the fusty classical music world, his disparate, energetic mélange of influences was swiftly embraced amid the multiculturalism that was fashionable in the 1990s, and Golijov nearly drowned in honors and commissions: Grammys, a MacArthur “genius” grant, a festival devoted to him at Lincoln Center, a concerto for Yo-Yo Ma.
His defining success, the irrepressibly percussive Afro-Latin oratorio “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” a bold updating of the tradition of the Bach Passions, premiered in 2000. (It was a good year for sprawling, polyglot recastings of religiously minded choral works: John Adams’s “El Niño,” about the Christmas story, was first heard three months later.)
“Ainadamar” was one of the often achingly lovely works that followed “La Pasión” in the handful of years before Golijov ran into a wall of unbearable pressure, missed deadlines and a plagiarism kerfuffle — leading to a decade of, essentially, silence before “Falling Out of a Time,” an intense, intimate song cycle about a grieving father, appeared just before the pandemic.
His work never quite went away, and “Ainadamar” is well traveled in a variety of productions. But it and him feel newly relevant in our time — even if the language of the “multiculti” ’90s has shifted to “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
