Boston Classical Review

Osvaldo Golijov’s “Creation” was given its world premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thursday night.

A little child shall lead them, a prophet once wrote. While Isaiah didn’t have Osvaldo Golijov’s Creation in mind, that image applies to the opening of the composer’s new oratorio, which kicks off with a “child-thistle” asking her “goddess-mother” a series of origin questions.

Conceived as a contemporary response to Haydn’s The Creation and commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Argentine native’s latest opus received its world premiere from that ensemble and assorted guests on Thursday night at Symphony Hall. If the sprawling, 115-minute-long, two-part effort—with a book by David Henry Hwang, lyrics by Leah Hager Cohen, and animations by Alex Sopp—didn’t add up to the sum of its parts, that wasn’t for want of trying.

In many musical regards, the score picks up where Golijov left off a quarter-century ago with La Pasión Según San Marcos. Granted, that work basically transported a South American street festival into the concert hall and Creation takes a rather more restrained view of things. Still, the composer’s familiar command of color, gesture, rhythm, and melody—Golijov is not afraid of enjoying a good tune or several—remains intact.

His writing in Creation is, broadly speaking, open and accessible. Occasionally it engages with more pop-oriented points of reference: there are dense, samba-like episodes in “Come, Sprout” and a steel drum in “The Push.” “First Fruits’” twangy guitar riffs suggest some sort of kinship with Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die.”

Throughout, too, Golijov’s longstanding enthusiasm for fusing different musical cultures and traditions appears alive and well. There are prominent solo episodes for kamancheh, and, over the oratorio’s first half, a percussionist playing all sorts of devices ranging from dried branches and triangle to a berimbau sits center-stage.

Ultimately, one appreciates that Creation is a too-rare thing in contemporary music: a substantial score intended to be understood by a wide audience. On that count, it largely succeeds. Indeed, it’s not too much to declare that, as a purely sonic experience, Golijov has crafted nearly two hours of music that mostly beguiles and delights the ear.

At the same time, Creation is discursive and structurally unbalanced. It is full of slow music and feels overlong. Part 1 runs for a full hour, and one can’t help but recognize the time passing: there’s no reason it couldn’t get its point across in half that duration—or possibly less.

Various episodes seem misjudged. The extended cello and kamancheh solos during “The Last Moho Brachatus,” for instance, are undeniably beautiful. But they serve no clear dramatic or narrative function. The “Bahamut” chorus that follows, too, is a drawn-out slog. Similar issues dot Part 2.

At some point in the evening, the listener comes to the realization that one of the chief glories of Creation’s Enlightenment-era model is that Haydn knew exactly what he was after, dramatically, and was more than happy to just get to the point. Then, again, he was working from a better libretto than Golijov had.

While Hwang and Cohen have retained some of the earlier work’s biblical texts and touchstones, the rest of their story—whose narrative is, at best, opaque—is drawn from a mélange of sources: the Poetic Edda, One Thousand and One Nights, Frida Kahlo, and Dante’s Commedia, among them.

Certainly, the intent to give voice to multiple viewpoints is welcome. But in attempting to be all things to all people, Creation ends up coming across as simplistic and flattening. The work’s loose narrative is one thing, but it’s hardly helped by Cohen’s lyrics. These are regularly verbose and sometimes just plain silly: “Ocean fulla stash/Gonna rise up and crash,” the children’s chorus sings at the end of Part 1. “You call this messy?/Read the sign/I take cash.”

The libretto’s efforts to address what the divines call man’s fallen nature don’t fare much better. While there are meditations on humanity’s penchant for violence, both against itself and animals (a bit surprisingly, Creation offers no explicit commentary on the climate crisis), those are undercut, a few minutes later, by the chorus’s trite paean to universality: “Always knew we were a we.”

Unpromising as much of its textual content proved, Thursday’s performance, which was led by Eric Jacobsen, was impressively sensitive and secure. The conductor, who was making his BSO debut, projected confidence and a thorough command of his forces, even as balances between the children’s and adult choruses, instrumentalists, and amplified soloists sometimes proved touchy.

Among the latter, Cécile McLorin Salvant brought pinpoint control to her several solos. Her voice proved a marvel of purity and haunting intimacy in “Rose Curve” and “Laika,” the latter’s tragic outer thirds touchingly conveying both mystery and pain.

Though bass-baritone Davóne Tines sounded a bit canned and uncomfortable in “Methusaleh,” he settled in powerfully for “First Fruits,” a recounting of Cain’s murder of his brother, Abel. Especially in the latter, Golijov’s writing for the singer pushed his extremes—there were striking guttural moments and piercing high ones—and Tines’ navigation of those challenges were among the evening’s high points.

As were the Part 1 contributions of percussionist Cyro Baptista, which included recitations with vocal distortion. (The solo percussion role is, unfortunately, tacet in Creation’s second half.) Kamanchehist Kayhan Kalhor brought florid color to his solo turns, not least those in Part 2’s “Vincent Starbound” movement.

The BSO x NEC Honors Children’s Choir (prepared by Michele Adams) and Tanglewood Festival Chorus (prepared by Jean-Sébastien Vallée) struggled to be heard in soft passages and Creation’s densely textured, multilingual choral writing meant that even bigger ones were sometimes a jumble, too. Nevertheless, the collective’s tonal blend was warm-hearted, especially in climaxes. The big a cappella refrain in the concluding “Everything in Motion” was particularly stirring.

Alex Sopp’s animations accompanied the evening’s supertitles. While the projection of lyrics were sometimes a bit of a mess—uncoordinated with the singers and riddled with discrepancies with the program book—the imagery behind them was often whimsical and enchanting: plants, birds, stars, a locomotive.

The last was a reference to a line from Vincent van Gogh (“Just as we take a train to reach Rouen, we take Death to reach a star”) which functioned as something of a mantra in the middle of Part 2. That turned out to be one of the more striking and memorable lyrics on this night full of ideas and activity whose reach ultimately exceeded its grasp.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday at Symphony Hall. bso.org

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