Azul for cello and orchestra

Composition and premiere: Osvaldo Golijov wrote Azul for cellist Yo-Yo Ma between late 2005 and July 2006 on a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra for its 125th anniversary. Yo-Yo Ma and the BSO premiered the piece under Donald Runnicles’s direction on August 4, 2006, in the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood. Jamey Haddad, percussion, and Michael Ward-Bergeman, accordion, were the “continuo” players in the first performance (see below). Golijov’s revised version of the score was premiered by cellist Alisa Weilerstein—what the composer calls the “world indoor premiere”—on July 31, 2007, with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra led by Louis Langrée in Avery Fisher Hall at New York City’s Lincoln Center.

Osvaldo Golijov and Yo-Yo Ma are both intensely curious about all things musical, delving into the endless variety of folk, traditional, and classical music, including Western classical music, from around the world, exploring the old and the new; and both musicians are constantly reinventing themselves. Being based in the Boston area and having significant relationships with the Boston Symphony Orchestra made it inevitable that the two would collaborate on a project with the BSO at some point. That point came in 2006, when Golijov finished his concerto Azul for Yo-Yo Ma, one of several works commissioned by the BSO to celebrate its 125th anniversary. Following their collaboration on Azul, Golijov and the Chinese musician Wu Tong collaborated to write Kuai Le (“Joy”), one of the opening anthems of the 2007 Special Olympics, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble in October 2007.

Originally, Golijov wrote Azul with its first venue, Tanglewood, in mind. The fact that the piece would be premiered here added further meaning to the event. Golijov was a Composition Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center in 1990, it was here that his YIDDISHBBUK was premiered by the St. Lawrence String Quartet in 1992, and it was here he met the Kronos Quartet the same year, leading to another breakout piece, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Golijov has been a Tanglewood Music Center faculty member on several occasions. 

The BSO has been involved in many other Golijov firsts, including the U.S. premiere of his La Pasión según San Marcos in 2001 and the world premiere in 2003 of the Tanglewood-commissioned opera Ainadamar. His Sign of the Leviathan for horn and strings was premiered here in 2015, and the BSO was a co-commissioner of his song cycle Ayre for soprano Dawn Upshaw, who performed it here with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and guests in 2004.

Golijov has collaborated extensively with the director Francis Ford Coppola, most recently writing the soundtrack for the director’s 2024 epic Megalopolis. Other recent highlights include a performance of La Pasión según San Marcos to open the Edinburgh Festival in 2024; a production of Ainadamar at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in October 2024, and the world premiere of the Megalopolis Suite with Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in November 2024. His The Given Note, composed for Johnny Gandelsman and The Knights, was premiered in May 2024. This fall in Boston, Golijov’s Creation, a major new commission for soloists, chorus, and orchestra with a libretto primarily by poet Leah Hager Cohen, will be premiered at Symphony Hall by the BSO with soloists Cécile McLorin Salvant, Davóne Tines, Cyro Baptista, and Kayhan Kalhor.

In conceiving Azul, Golijov knew that he didn’t want to write a virtuoso solo showcase for Yo-Yo Ma, who has many such pieces already in his repertoire. Rather he chose contemplation over conflict, writing a piece that is not a concerto, somewhat in the sphere, Golijov says, of the 19th-century French composer Hector Berlioz’s non-concerto for viola, Harold in Italy. The piece was also the composer’s reconsideration of his earlier Tenebrae for soprano, clarinet, and string quartet, which itself is based partly on the melismatic settings of Hebrew letter names in François Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres, and sought to “evoke the majesty of certain Baroque adagios” and to access the special light-filled airiness that one hears in Couperin.

In revising the work, Golijov was inspired by imagery in Pablo Neruda’s poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” to bring the ethereal music of the concerto back to the tactile and the grounded: 

Someone waiting for me among the violins
met with a world like a buried tower
sinking its spiral below the layered leaves
color of raucous sulfur:
and lower yet, in a vein of gold,
like a sword in a scabbard of meteors,
I plunged a turbulent and tender hand
to the most secret organs of the earth. (trans. Nathaniel Tarn)

It’s Neruda’s poem that spurred the title of Azul’s first part, “Paz Sulfúrica”—“Sulfurous Peace.” The composer achieves this grounding with defined harmonic movement and active parts for the solo cello as well as its partner within the continuo group, the “hyperaccordion.” This instrument, invented by Michael Ward-Bergeman, is an electronically prepared and amplified accordion with an otherworldly sound. Also more prominent are the percussion elements of the continuo: the two players improvise in “conversation.” Golijov places great trust in his close collaborators, allowing the percussionists latitude to choose from a huge array of instruments from many musical traditions; the selection may change from performance to performance.

Golijov thought of the orchestra in Azul as being an “antenna” for the soloist, a collective body taking in and processing various musical energies and creating auras, halos, around the cello’s music. Each group of instruments has a discrete function. The soloist sits to the left of the conductor, who is in the usual downstage center position. The original layout of the ensemble reflected this more explicitly, but the revised version has the orchestra in a more traditional setup.

The second part, beginning with the slow, atmospheric Silencio, evokes Couperin’s slow melismatic lines in the solo part, over a gossamer orchestral accompaniment. From time to time the Baroque form of the chaconne is called up, with “looped” harmonic patterns holding sway for a time before the music’s journey continues on a new path. A substantial and ecstatic written-out cadenza (III. Transit) for the cello accompanied by accordion and percussion, followed by a percussion cadenza, leads into a kind of recapitulation of the start of the piece (IV. Yrushalem), but with new, expansive melody. Two astral codas, aptly titled “Pulsar” and “Shooting Stars,” complete the piece.

In creating this unique sound-world, Golijov’s aim for Azul is to establish an environment in which the music onstage ebbs and flows through “emergences and submersions” that suggest different levels of focus on the part of the listener. The notion of an orchestra receptive of musical energy is an idea that expands to take in the audience, and with their added energy expands yet further, beyond the auditorium, infinitely out into the blue.

Robert Kirzinger

Robert Kirzinger is a composer and writer.