Boston Symphony Orchestra Premieres Golijov's 'Creation'

The Boston Symphony Orchestra gives the world premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's "Creation" on November 12–14. All performances take place at Symphony Hall in Boston.

The new evening-length oratorio (a large-scale work for soloists, chorus and orchestra) is a contemporary response to Haydn's "The Creation." Golijov's version trades Viennese Enlightenment confidence for something more unsettled. Haydn had angels. Golijov has Dante, van Gogh and Frida Kahlo.

Who performs it?

The vocal soloists are Cécile McLorin Salvant and Davóne Tines. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the BSO x NEC Honors Children's Choir join them. Eric Jacobsen conducts.

The instrumental soloist list reads like a cross-genre wish list:

• Cyro Baptista, Brazilian percussionist
• Kayhan Kalhor, master of the kamancheh (a Persian spiked fiddle)
• Jeremy Flower, who also serves as sound designer

Behind them, Alex Sopp provides original artwork and animation, with Camilla Tassi as projection designer. This is not a concert that intends to look like a concert.

What is the piece actually about?

According to the BSO's announcement, Golijov's "Creation" moves between celebration and lamentation. The work confronts both the beauty of the natural world and humanity's capacity for cruelty and tenderness, asking what it means for human beings to become creators.

The libretto is assembled rather than written from scratch. Lyrics come from playwright David Henry Hwang and novelist Leah Hager Cohen, set alongside writings by Dante Alighieri, Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Ecclesiastes, the Zohar and the Psalms. That range is characteristic of Golijov, the Argentine-born composer who has spent a career folding flamenco, klezmer and Latin American idioms into orchestral frames — La Pasión según San Marcos remains his best-known act of synthesis, and "Creation" extends the method.

A warning to anyone expecting Haydn's orderly cosmology: an oratorio that pairs the Zohar with van Gogh's letters is not aiming for tidiness. The blend of sacred texts, modern painters and a jazz-tinged vocalist in Salvant suggests the BSO expects, and wants, an audience broader than its usual subscription base.

Who commissioned it?

"Creation" is co-commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Edinburgh International Festival. The Edinburgh partnership signals a European staging to come, though the source names no dates for it.

The premiere also lands within a broader institutional push. The BSO has already announced a 2026 "Creation Festival," with Davóne Tines, Louise Alder and Bogdan Volkov among its headliners, and Golijov's opera "Falling Out of Time" receives its West Coast premiere at the Annenberg Center. The composer, in short, is having a run.

Boston audiences get first hearing on November 12, with performances through November 14 at Symphony Hall.