OSVALDO GOLIJOV
Release Date: January 16, 2026
EVER YOURS
For more than three decades, Osvaldo Golijov has been expanding the expressive reach of chamber music—transforming the string ensemble into a medium of devotion and remembrance. Works such as The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994) and Falling Out of Time (2019) redefined the modern string soundscape. His compositions dwell in the space where song becomes prayer and grief turns toward light.
With Ever Yours, recorded in Amsterdam in January 2025, Golijov returns to that intimate conversation between sound and spirit. The album brings together four works—Ever Yours, Esperanza, Tintype, and K’vakarat—that trace a throughline in his creative life: friendship, hope, memory, and faith as lived through music.
Ever Yours (2022, revised 2025)
Arethusa Quartet · Animato Quartet · Nicholas Schwartz, double bass
In its original version for string octet, Ever Yours was the final piece Golijov wrote for and dedicated to violinist and St. Lawrence String Quartet co-founder Geoff Nuttall—“my brother in music and life,” he says. “He was the first person to understand what I was trying to say as a composer.” It was commissioned by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam, and The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland.
The work draws on two sources of inspiration: brotherhood, as embodied in the letters Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo—always ending with the words “Ever Yours”—and Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in D minor, Op. 76, No. 2, the beloved “Quinten” (Fifths) Quartet, which Nuttall admired above all others.
Haydn’s quartet—“a love letter to music,” as Golijov calls it—becomes a prism through which Ever Yours refracts new colors. The first movement takes Haydn’s opening pairs of fifths and passes them through a “metaphorical prism,” generating fresh harmonies. The second movement turns inward, placing Haydn’s theme “under a metaphorical microscope,” magnifying the distances between notes until they vibrate like “interstellar dust.”
As Nuttall’s health declined, a passage from van Gogh’s letters stayed with the composer: “Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France. Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.” That vision—of death as a journey to light—shapes Ever Yours. In its third movement, Golijov multiplies Haydn’s canonic writing into a rich polyphony, where, as he says, “a passage from Beethoven’s last quartet emerged—to my surprise and to no surprise.” The finale transforms a four-note Hungarian figure from Haydn’s last movement into an exuberant dance, a kind of cosmic bark of joy inspired, unexpectedly, by Golijov’s memory of being greeted by his uncle’s seventeen dogs.
“Ever Yours is a conversation about music, Haydn, friendship, life, and death between Geoff and me,” Golijov writes. With Nuttall gone and the St. Lawrence String Quartet disbanded, the piece found new life in Amsterdam, performed by the Arethusa and Animato quartets and double bassist Nicholas Schwartz—musicians Golijov calls “true new friends.” Guided by pianist and longtime collaborator Stephen Prutsman, the sessions were, in Golijov’s words, “joyous and poignant.”
Tintype (2024)
Arethusa Quartet · Barry Shiffman, viola
Tintype began as a film theme—an invitation from director Oren Rudavsky to compose music for the documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire. Golijov was moved by the film’s animated dream sequences, where Wiesel dreams of his father who perished in the Holocaust. “They are full of sentiment, but not sentimentality,” he says.
From that seed, a full trio of movements emerged. The first evokes a vanished world through a traditional Hebrew melody transcribed by Joseph Achron and beloved by Jascha Heifetz and Joseph Hassid; it flickers from ghostliness into vitality before fading again. The second movement, initially written for the film, recalls the tender melancholy of Schubert’s E-flat Piano Trio and Mozart’s quintets, which Golijov calls “an endless melancholy walk.” The finale transforms the prayer “Ani Maamin”—“I believe”—which Wiesel sings at the end of the film, alternating between sparse, fractured fragments and urgent, motoric passages inspired by Philip Glass.
“Tintype,” Golijov says, “is like a photograph of belief—its shadows, its shine, its endurance.”
K’vakarat (1993 / arr. 2024)
Arethusa Quartet · Barry Shiffman, viola
K’vakarat—meaning “As a Shepherd…”—is drawn from the Yom Kippur liturgy, comparing God to a shepherd deciding which sheep shall live or die. Originally composed in 1993 for cantor Misha Alexandrovich and the Kronos Quartet, it became the final movement of The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994).
Three decades later, Barry Shiffman, Nuttall’s co-founder in the St. Lawrence Quartet, arranged it for viola and string quartet. “For me, the viola adds a more personal connection. The vibrato allows for a more intense emotional connection,” said Shiffman. The melody appears three times, each return a transformation—first accompanied by a “sublimated shepherd’s flute,” and finally, by a sword, “to rebel against the meaning of the text and, as it happens sometimes in Jewish tradition, to wrestle with God,” said Golijov.
Esperanza (2025)
Arethusa Quartet · Animato Quartet · Nicholas Schwartz, double bass
If Ever Yours is a letter to the departed, Esperanza is its reply—a work of gratitude, renewal, and quiet joy.
The music began as a love theme for Francis Ford Coppola’s film Megalopolis. Coppola asked Golijov for “something like Romeo and Juliet, but geometric,” and the composer responded with a theme both lyrical and abstract: a four-note motif that ascends three times, always yearning upward before finally resolving in grace. That melody, Golijov explains, is “almost an idea of hope made audible.” Its geometry—three ascents followed by a release—evokes persistence, the human need to reach again and again toward light.
The chamber version heard here was never planned. During the Amsterdam recording sessions for Ever Yours, Golijov found himself so moved by the chemistry among the Arethusa and Animato quartets and bassist Nicholas Schwartz that one morning, before heading to the studio, he arranged Esperanza anew for them. “It was an act of thanks,” he says, “an offering to their musicianship and heart.”
Musically, Esperanza unfolds as a single breath. The double bass grounds the ensemble like the earth’s pulse, while the two quartets weave shimmering lines of ascent and suspension—hope enacted as motion. Harmonies glow and dissolve, never arriving too soon; tension resolves only at the point of surrender.
If Ever Yours wrestles with mortality, Esperanza answers with renewal—the sound of dawn after a long night. In the final bars, the strings seem to hover between memory and light, as if hope itself were exhaled into air.
A Continuing Homage
With this album, Golijov gathers a lifetime of dialogue—with Haydn, van Gogh, Geoff Nuttall, and the many musicians who have carried his music forward. It is a work of correspondence in the deepest sense: each piece a letter, each performance a reply.
In Amsterdam, that exchange came vividly to life. Between takes, laughter mingled with silence; daylight moved across the studio’s wooden floor. Daniel Rowland from the Arethusa Quartet described the recording session as “magical, where trust between composer and musicians brought Golijov’s searing vision to light.” For Golijov, the experience affirmed what his music has always sought: the conversation between love and loss, between the living and the departed, between sound and the stars.
In the end, Ever Yours is more than a dedication—it expresses the enduring meaning of living.
Ever yours.
For more information, please contact
Krista Williams, Christopher Emond or Carla Sacks at Sacks & Co., 212.741.1000.
