“Give me,” Pablo Neruda beseeched the gods of metaphor in a 1961 poem, “the secret wine kept in each syllable” — the help to conjure images of our oceans receding into myth.
This is a startlingly prophetic work. In his text, Neruda bequeathed a timely monument where “crashing waves have disappeared, seas that passed away with chant and travelers.” Painfully, he also might have been describing Golijov’s career, which has mimicked the “coming and going of surfs, of races of honey fallen into the marine jug upon the reefs.”
An overzealous journalist mistook compositional transformation for plagiarism, only adding to Golijov’s insecurities. He scored a couple of Francis Ford Coppola films that never caught on, but there have been few new works, and nothing major. He never completed a violin concerto commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic or an opera for the Met. Performances of his music have become less prominent. A prestigious recording contract dried up.
“Oceana” is a reinvention of the Bach cantata form for a modern age, Golijov celebrating the oceans and dramatizing their demise with the same transfixing death-and-transfiguration emotions and musical resourcefulness that Bach employed to celebrate God and render the last days of Jesus. The structure is a series of “calls” — vocal effusions and scat songs for Souza, accompanied by a Latin-tinged ensemble of guitars, harp, percussion and flutes.
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