Composer Osvaldo Golijov To Release New Album 'Ever Yours' in January

Composer Osvaldo Golijov will release a new album of chamber music, Ever Yours, on January 16 via Phenotypic Recordings. It is available to pre-order/pre-save here.

Golijov's new album comprises four works—Ever Yours, Tintype, K’vakarat, and Esperanza—traces a throughline in his creative life: friendship, hope, memory, and faith as lived through music. The collection’s first single, “Starbound,” is out now. Listen to it below.

The title work, Ever Yours (2022, revised 2025), was Golijov’s final composition written for violinist Geoff Nuttall, his longtime collaborator and co-founder of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Originally composed for string octet and 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 piece draws inspiration from Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo—always signed “Ever Yours”—and from Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in D minor, Op. 76, No. 2 (“Quinten”), Nuttall’s most cherished work.

Golijov reflects, “Geoff was the first person to understand what I was trying to say as a composer. My brother in music and life. I wrote Ever Yours, primarily, as a conversation about music, Haydn, friendship, life, and death, between Geoff and me. Geoff is now gone, and his (and my) beloved St. Lawrence String Quartet, which he co-founded and led for more than 30 years, has disbanded. But the idea of a conversation between friends continues to live in this new version of the work.”

Recorded after Nuttall’s passing, the revised version brings together the Arethusa Quartet and the Animato Quartet with double bassist Nicholas Schwartz, under the guidance of pianist and longtime collaborator Stephen Prutsman.

Tintype (2024) was written in response to Oren Rudavsky’s documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire. Inspired by dreamlike sequences in which Wiesel remembers his father, the work unfolds in three movements that move between memory, lyrical reflection, and expressions of belief through the prayer “Ani Maamin.”

K’vakarat (1993), drawn from the Yom Kippur liturgy, reaches back to Golijov’s early career. Originally written for cantor Misha Alexandrovich and the Kronos Quartet and later included in The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, it appears here in a new arrangement by violist Barry Shiffman for viola and string quartet, highlighting its intimate, vocal quality.

Also featured is Esperanza (2025), a work of renewal and quiet joy originally composed as the love theme for Francis Ford Coppola’s film Megalopolis. Built around a four-note motif that rises repeatedly before resolving, the chamber version on the album was created spontaneously during the Amsterdam sessions as a way to thank the musicians.

EVER YOURS TRACK LIST

Ever Yours

I. Sowing Fifths

II. Starbound

III. You Reap What You Sow

IV. Papa

Tintype

V. Hebrew Melody

VI. Elie dreams of his father

VII. Ani Maamin

K’vakarat

VIII. K’vakarat

Esperanza

IX. Esperanza—Love Theme from the Soundtrack for Megalopolis

ABOUT OSVALDO GOLIJOV

Osvaldo Golijov’s works include the St. Mark Passion; the opera Ainadamar; Azul, a cello concerto; The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, for clarinet and string quartet; the song cycles Ayre and Falling Out of Time; and the soundtracks for Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, Youth Without Youth, and Megalopolis.

His most recent works include LAIꓘA, written for Anthony Roth Costanzo and the Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble; The Given Note, a fantasy for violinist Johnny Gandelsman and The Knights; and Megalopolis Suite for Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He was born in La Plata, Argentina, in 1960, and lived in Jerusalem before immigrating to the U.S. in 1986. He is the Composer-in-Residence at The College of the Holy Cross.