In our increasingly interconnected world, the multi-cultural music of Osvaldo Golijov speaks in a voice that is powerful yet touching, contemporary yet timeless. Golijov's parents, a piano teacher mother and a physician father, emigrated from Russia to Argentina, where Osvaldo was born on December 5, 1960 in La Playa, thirty miles from Buenos Aires, into a rich artistic environment in which he was exposed from infancy to such varied musical experiences as classical chamber music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the tango nuevo of Astor Piazzolla. He studied piano and composition at the local conservatory before moving in 1983 to Jerusalem, where he entered the Rubin Academy as a composition student of Mark Kopytman and immersed himself in the colliding musical traditions of that city.

Golijov came to the United States in 1986 to do his doctoral work with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent summers at Tanglewood on fellowship studying with Lukas Foss and Oliver Knussen. In 1990, he won Tanglewood's Fromm Commission, which resulted in Yiddishbbuk, premiered by the St. Lawrence String Quartet at Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music in July 1992 and winner the following year of the prestigious Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Golijov came to wide public notice in 2000 with the Pasión según San Marcos (“Passion According to Saint Mark''), commissioned in remembrance of the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death by German conductor Helmut Rilling and the International Bach Academy of Stuttgart. The Passion integrates popular and classical idioms in a work that embraces multiple manifestations of the Christian faith in Latin America (and Golijov's own Jewish heritage), and subsequent performances have been received with a tumultuous enthusiasm rarely seen in the concert hall; the recording (on Hänssler Classic) earned a Grammy nomination.

Golijov's works, with their syntheses of European, American and Latin secular cultures and their deep spirituality drawn from both Judaism and Christianity, have brought him international notoriety and, in 2003, a coveted MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award." He was named Musical America's "2005 Composer of the Year," and in 2006, Lincoln Center presented a festival called "The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov," featuring performances of his large works (including the St. Mark Passion and the opera Ainadamar), chamber music and film scores. In 2008, he received a Vilcek Foundation Prize, which annually recognizes "foreign-born individuals for extraordinary contributions to society in the United States" in the fields of arts and biomedical research.

Osvaldo Golijov is Loyola Professor of Music at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he has been on the faculty since 1991; he has also taught at the Boston Conservatory, Tanglewood Music Center and Sundance Composers Lab. Golijov has served residencies with the Marlboro, Ravinia, Spoleto USA and Cape and Islands music festivals, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Merkin Hall and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Music Alive series, and held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall in 2012-2013.

Golijov wrote of The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, "About 800 years ago, Isaac the Blind, the great Kabbalist rabbi of Provence, dictated a manuscript in which he asserted that all things and events in the universe are the product of combinations of the Hebrew alphabet's letters. His conviction still resonates today: don't we have scientists who believe that the clue to our life and fate is hidden in other codes?

"Isaac's lifelong devotion to his art is as striking as that of string quartets and klezmer musicians. In their search for something that arises from tangible elements but transcends them, they are all reaching for a state of communion. Gershom Scholem, the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, says that ‘Isaac and his disciples do not speak of ecstasy, of a unique act of stepping outside oneself in which human consciousness abolishes itself. Debhequth (communion) is a constant state, nurtured and renewed through meditation.' If communion is not the reason, how else would one explain the strange life that Isaac led, or the decades during which groups of four musical souls dissolve their individuality into single, higher organisms called string quartets? How would one explain the chain of klezmer generations that, while blessing births, weddings and burials, were trying to discover the melody that could be set free from itself and become only air, spirit, ruakh?

"The movements of this work sound to me as if written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people throughout our history. This somehow reflects the composition's epic nature. I hear the prelude and the first movement, the most ancient, in Aramaic; the second movement is in Yiddish, the rich and fragile language of a long exile; the third movement and the postlude are in sacred Hebrew.

"The prelude and the first movement simultaneously explore two prayers in different ways: the orchestra plays the first part of the central prayer of the High Holidays — 'We will observe the mighty holiness of this day ...' — while the clarinet dreams the motifs from 'Our Father, Our King.' In the prelude, the music is like a celestial accordion, rising and falling like breathing, like praying ... like air then the air is transformed into a pulse and heart. The whole first movement is a heartbeat that accelerates wildly, becoming frantic ... searching for a revelation that is always out of reach.

"The second movement is based on The Old Klezmer Band, a traditional dance tune.

"The string orchestra is an accordion in the prelude, a klezmer band in the second movement; now, in the third movement, it's a shepherd's magic flute. This last movement is a purely instrumental version of K'vakarat [a prayer of Yom Kippur - As a shepherd musters his sheep and causes them to pass beneath his staff, so dost Thou pass and record, count and visit, every living soul, appointing the measure of every creature's life and decreeing its destiny], a work I wrote in 1994 for the Kronos Quartet and Cantor Misha Alexandrovich.”

George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower was born in Biala, Poland sometime between 1778 and 1780; his mother was of Polish or German extraction, his father was probably from the West Indies, though he liked to claim that he was an "Abyssinian Prince." The mulatto Bridgetower proved to be a remarkable prodigy of the violin, and he was accepted into the musical establishment of the Prince of Wales at Brighton when he was just ten. The following year, he played in the violin section for the Haydn-Salomon concerts in London, and thereafter billed himself as "a student of Haydn." In 1803, Bridgetower was granted a leave of absence to visit his mother in Dresden, take the waters at Teplitz and Carlsbad, and play some concerts en route. His public and private performances in Dresden created a sensation, and his arrival in Vienna in early May was awaited by the local music lovers there with a heady mixture of excitement and curiosity. Beethoven met the 23-year-old Bridgetower almost immediately, and the two got along splendidly- the composer praised him as "a very capable virtuoso who has a complete command of his instrument." Beethoven proposed both to write a new piece for Bridgetower's debut in the city on May 24th and to accompany him at the piano, and he set to work immediately on a large Sonata in A major that would properly display the skills of the two executants. He worked tirelessly but was able to complete only the first two movements in time for the performance. For the finale, he lifted the last movement of the Violin Sonata, Op. 30, No. 1 of the previous year, conveniently also in the key of A major, and later filled the gap in the earlier work with a set of variations. The premiere was a success (the second movement had to be encored), and Bridgetower remained in Vienna until July, playing to considerable acclaim and spending many evenings with his new buddy, Ludwig van Beethoven.

By all rights, this work, published as Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata in 1805 by Simrock, should be called the "Bridgetower" Sonata, in honor of the performer for whom it was written. According to an interview Bridgetower granted when he visited Vienna in 1845, such was the composer's original intention, but he added that they had a quarrel "over a girl," and Beethoven denied him the dedication in recompense. Instead, the score was inscribed to the well-known French violinist and composer Rodolphe Kreutzer, whom Beethoven had met in 1798 in Vienna. Beethoven maintained an infrequent correspondence with Kreutzer thereafter, but apparently regarded him as a friend, calling him "a good, amiable man who during his stay here gave me much pleasure. His unaffectedness and natural manner are more to my taste than all extérieur or intérieur of most virtuosos." Beethoven justified the transfer of the dedication by telling Simrock, "As the Sonata was written for a thoroughly capable violinist, the dedication to Kreutzer is all the more appropriate." In 1801, four years before the publication appeared, Kreutzer had been appointed solo violin of the Paris Opéra and a year later he was named Chamber Musician to Napoleon, and Beethoven's dedication seems to have been as much an attempt to insinuate his music with the leading violinist of France as a reward for any musical or personal empathy. Indeed, Kreutzer apparently had little liking for Beethoven's then-avant garde creations, demonstratively stomping out of the Paris premiere of the Second Symphony with his hands clapped over his ears and refusing to play in public the Sonata dedicated to him, accusing the music of being "utterly unintelligible." For Beethoven, who was shrewd about using dedications for his own professional and social advantage, Kreutzer's rejection of his Sonata must have induced in him an almost wild frustration. The "Kreutzer" Sonata was the ninth in a flurry of such works that Beethoven produced in just a half-dozen years; he did not return to the genre again for a decade, composing his last work in the form, the Op. 96 Sonata in G major, in 1813. The "Kreutzer" is the most brilliant and overtly virtuosic of the ten sonatas, written, according to the composer, “in the concertante style, almost like a concerto." Beethoven did not mean by this comment that the piano was a sort of abbreviated instrumental ensemble accompanying the solo violin, but that the two were equals in what amounts to a virtual concerto without orchestra. The piano writing is comparable in its invention and richness of sonority to the contemporary "Waldstein" and "Appassionata" Sonatas, while the treatment of the violin passes well beyond the sweetness and elegance of the waning Classical manner to adopt an aggressive, fiery, declamatory style that characterizes Beethoven's most advanced and audacious works of the time. (The "Eroica" Symphony also dates from 1803.) So strongly did this spirit of intense emotional display affect Leo Tolstoy that he wrote his novel The Kreutzer Sonata in 1889 under its spell. In the book, the main character's mental instability, a condition Tolstoy attributes to hearing a performance of the Sonata, leads him to murder his wife. "It seemed that entirely new impulses, new possibilities, were revealed to me in myself, such as I had not dreamed of before," says Tolstoy's tragic hero. "Such works should be played only in grave, significant conditions, and only then when certain deeds corresponding to such music are to be accomplished." Not all listeners are provoked to such extreme actions upon listening to the compositions of Beethoven, though this music's expressive power and strength of utterance continue to move, delight and rejuvenate all whom it touches.

The first movement of the "Kreutzer" Sonata is a formal curiosity, beginning with a slow introduction in the nominal key of A major as preface to a large sonata structure in the parallel minor mode. (The only precedent for this procedure that the immensely learned English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey could find in the Classical literature was Mozart's Violin Sonata in G, K. 379.) The main theme, given to begin the quicker tempo, is a dashing staccato phrase with a vaguely Turkish tint. The chorale-like subsidiary motive provides only a brief respite from the driving impetuosity of the music. There is considerable developmental dialogue between the instruments before the earlier themes are recapitulated. The Andante is a spacious set of variations on a long theme of genial nature. The flamboyant, tarantella-rhythm finale provides a suitably brilliant ending to one of the greatest of Beethoven's instrumental duets.

The "Kreutzer" proved to be Beethoven's most popular sonata for two instruments, and it has appeared in arrangements for cello and piano (by Beethoven's student Carl Czerny), solo piano, two pianos, piano four hands, organ and guitar. In 1832, the Bonn music publisher Simrock, who had issued the original version of the "Kreutzer" Sonata in 1805, published an uncredited arrangement of it for string quintet. It has been conjectured that the arrangement (heard at this concert) was by Ferdinand Ries, the composer's amanuensis when Sonata was written, or perhaps by Beethoven himself, though it seems unlikely that Simrock would have waited for five years after the composer's death to capitalize on his wide popularity. (Arrangements for piano [two or four hands], string quartet, guitar duet and wind band of the Septet for Winds and Strings, for example, as well as the composer's own rescoring as the Trio for Piano, Clarinet [or Violin] and Cello, Op. 38, made that work his most widely performed piece during his lifetime.) Whoever its author, the string ensemble arrangement of the "Kreutzer" is skillfully done, retaining the work's musical substance but reworking its lines to clarify the complex textures, augment its sonority, and distribute the work's technical challenges among the members of the ensemble.