Osvaldo Golijov’s "Mariel"

The living best honor those passed by living. It’s been a hard weird couple weeks around here, sometimes feeling hollow, sometimes ecstatic to realize how many lives our friend touched. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Casey and had the chance to catch up with Matt DeWine, which was amazing. Our good friends Brother Truck went down to Pieholden to record this weekend; not only did Jay leave us with a bunch of great music but also with the resources to continue to make our own. A brilliant good man…

And so we live. Last night I had a terrific reminder of how Chicago can be astonishingly cool sometimes. Grabbed the train downtown afterwork and got to see my pals Paul and Angel performing with their band Allá on the huge outdoor Gehry-designed stage at Millennium Park. It was pretty amazing; they were great. But I couldn’t stay for St. Vincent, ‘cos I was meeting Whitney around the corner for a MusicNow concert featuring members of the CSO. The first piece was Composer-in-Residence Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel (for marimba and cello). And it was mind-blowing. So beautiful, so sad, so well-made and so brilliantly performed. The CSO has a hidden treasure in their percussionist Cynthia Yeh, she is truly a genius.

The piece resonated with what’s been happening:

“I wrote the original version of Mariel, for cello and marimba, when I learned of the death in an accident of my friend Mariel Stubrin,” Golijov explains. “I attempted to capture that short instant before grief, in which one learns of the sudden death of a friend who was full of life: a single moment frozen forever in one’s memory, and which reverberates through the piece, in the waves and echoes of the Brazilian music that Mariel loved.”

This is a version recorded by WNYC, of a performance at Alice Tully Hall in February 2009; Maya Beiser - cello, Tomoya Aomori - marimba.

Mariel by Osvaldo Golijov