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National Radio Series 2024–2025

Golijov's Quartets

First Aired Jul 2, 2025
0:58:59
audio Audio / Radio Program
1. Introduction 00:00:34
2. Golijov: YIDDISHBBUK: Inscriptions for Strings Quartet 00:15:45
3. Golijov: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind for Clarinet and String Quartet 00:42:10
⟨ National Radio Series

The Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov is renowned for his energetic style, which fuses folk elements with Classical forms and instruments to create one-of-a-kind musical experiences. On this broadcast, the St. Lawrence String Quartet presents a pair of masterpieces for quartet with scriptural inspirations by Golijov. His 1992 Yiddishbbuk for String Quartet is a set of “Inscriptions” named for a book of psalms that Franz Kafka transcribed in his diary. Golijov took the most musical of these verses, which describe “a broken song played on a shattered cymbalom,” and the stunning, pure singing of those condemned to hell, and built three striking movements from these sonic images. The piece memorializes specific people, from children who were killed during the holocaust, to the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, to Leonard Bernstein. On the second part of the broadcast, Golijov takes us on an epic journey in his quintet for clarinet and strings, The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Over the course of this thoughtful work, the composer exposes us to the spiritual significance of the string quartet, “groups of four souls who dissolve their individuality into single, higher organisms,” and we dance and weep with Golijov’s powerful, Klezmer-style clarinet writing.

PROGRAM

Osvaldo Golijov

(1960–)

YIDDISHBBUK: Inscriptions for Strings Quartet

St. Lawrence String Quartet (Geoff Nuttall, Barry Shiffman, violin; Lesley Robertson, viola; Christopher Costanza, cello)

Osvaldo Golijov

(1960–)

The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind for Clarinet and String Quartet (1994)

Todd Palmer, clarinet; St. Lawrence String Quartet (Geoff Nuttall, Barry Shiffman, violin; Lesley Robertson, viola; Christopher Costanza, cello)
 
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