Osvaldo Golijov: Composes with Francis Ford Coppola

July 14th 2008, by Tobias |

Only shortly after the announcement that director Francis Ford Coppola had asked contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov to write the score to his latest film project “Youth Without Youth”, the soundtrack has now been made available on Sony Classical. The movie was a liberation for Coppola, who struggled to complete another opus magnum of his, “Megalopolis” but found himself in a creative cul de sac. When the novel “Youth Without Youth” by Mircea Eliade miraculously dropped into his lap, he was immediately spell-bound, realising the flic in no time. His choice of Osvaldo Golijov was motivated by two criteria. On the one hand, Golijov is half-Romanian himself (his other parent coming from the Ukraine), despite spending large portions of his life in Argentina and the Ukraine. And secondly, he has turned into one of the most succesful and sought-after composers of the 21st century thanks to collaborations with the Kronos Quartet, award winning pieces and a string of succesful CD releases.

In an interview for PRI’s “The World”, Osvaldo Golijov admitted that scoring a soundtrack still made him feel slightly uneasy “I was so nervous because I think film composing is almost a different craft”, he said, “I'm used the writing a piece of music that maybe 90 minutes long or 80 minutes long and where music IS the movie, where the narrative is carried by the music. But in the art of film scoring sometimes you have to so condensed, sometimes in a few seconds you conjure up a whole world.” Still, “Youth Without Youth” is not his first detour into the world of cinema, with his contribution to Sally Potter's film "The Man Who Cried" dating back to the year 2000.

For his encounter with Coppola’s intense cosmos of visuals, Osvaldo Golijov therefore required a tightly planned schedule and very concrete ideas about sound. He got them without problems, as Coppola turned out to be a fervent music fan himself, who was deeply interested in a dialogue between the director and composer. As a consequence, all aspects of the writing process were up to discussion, including the instrumentation (Strings and Celesta instead of Brass and Winds). In the final stages, Coppola and Golijov even finetuned the music together with the Bucharest Metropolitan Orchestra, adjusting each sequence to the images.

Sony Classical have characterised as “Sonic excursion between Balkan sounds, Gypsy tradition and clear symphonic passages”, a judgement you can now confirm by heading over to the movie’s mini site, which offers streaming of the entire (!) score for free.

Apparently, Coppola enjoyed working with Osvaldo Golijov so much he asked him to extend their collaboration for his next movie, “Tetro”, tentatively scheduled for 2009.

Picture by Caroline Irby

Homepage: “Youth Without Youth” Mini Site
Homepage: Osvaldo Golijov