horn-strings
Abbreviations (PDF)
Boosey & Hawkes (Hendon Music)
Like Balaam’s, this piece was meant to be a curse, but it turned into a blessing. It’s Chapter 41 in The Book of Job, but it’s not just about the inscrutability and magnificence of the Leviathan—it is also about the monster’s solitude and longing, and to express that there is an instrument, the French horn, and there is a musician, James Sommerville. The orchestra is only strings, to express color through densities, like in Rembrandt’s etchings.
Composing this piece for the Tanglewood Music Center’s 75th Anniversary has a deep musical and personal meaning for me. I am grateful to this place and to the vision of its founders and its stewards.
—Osvaldo Golijov
"...[the soloist], "suspended in a slow-bobbing 6/8 tide, conjures the beast’s song as well as the foghorns of its seafaring milieu. Strings evoke waves that lap, swell, and splash, even as their unanimity of timbre underlines the protagonist’s isolation."
Boston Globe