From a gilt-edged box in the darkened hall of the Chicago Symphony Centre, there comes a shout - a raw, flamenco call that echoes through the auditorium, causing several members of the audience to sit up straighter. It hangs in the air for a few seconds, until it is met by the orchestra - which tonight, alongside the usual strings, woodwind and percussion, includes a flamenco guitarist, a large cajón drum, and an electronic sampler machine that sits on a stand next to the conductor, like an unconventional first violin.
This is Ainadamar, the first opera by the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, who, at least in the classical world, is pretty much the definition of unconventional. In America, where he has lived since 1986, he has been hailed as classical music's saviour; he counts Alex Ross, the New Yorker's influential critic, among his fans, and for the New York Times he is no less than "a major energising force in a classical world desperately in need of a new vision".
But on this side of the Atlantic, Golijov's name remains relatively unknown - and the mere mention of it tends to attract a barrage of criticism. Two years ago, a programme of his works at the Barbican in London - where Ainadamar is about to receive its first full performance in the capital - was almost universally panned. "Golijov evidently does not subscribe to the less-is-more school of composition," said the Daily Telegraph. "Osvaldo Golijov's cheerfully eclectic style has been hailed as the future of contemporary music," said the Guardian's Andrew Clements, before adding, deadpan: "Let's hope not."
The memory of this is fresh in Golijov's mind when we meet at his hotel in Chicago, where he has been composer-in-residence with the city's world-renowned Symphony Orchestra since 2006. Slight and cheery, with short, grey-flecked hair, rimless glasses and a ready smile, he looks not unlike a friendly bank manager. But he is not happy when I raise the subject of his reception from British critics. "There is a really primitive, primal collective mentality among critics in England," he says angrily. "Every composer is anointed and then beheaded. It's not my fault - I never went out and said, 'I'm the future.' I know that I'm nobody next to a great composer like Mozart. I'm a minor composer," he adds with a half-smile, "but I'm a really good minor composer."
Stateside, they disagree about the "minor" part. Golijov had just started work on a commission for New York's Metropolitan Opera with Anthony Minghella, due to reach the stage in 2011, before the director's untimely death last month. Then there is Golijov's film work: he scored Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth last year, and is now working with the director again. As for Ainadamar, a 2006 recording of the opera won two Grammy awards, and performances tend to receive standing ovations.
What unites Golijov's critics and fans is the fact that he is unafraid to bring diverse musical traditions together. Born in 1960 to an eastern European Jewish family in the Argentine city of La Plata, as a child Golijov would sit under the piano while his mother, a piano teacher, gave lessons: "I had music literally surrounding me," he recalls. His father, a doctor, passed on his love for the great tango singer, Astor Piazzolla; and as a teenager, Golijov became active in the family's synagogue, as a singer, organist and arranger. These disparate influences are borne out in his music; his first recording in 2002 was Yiddishbbuk, an album of chamber pieces shot through with Jewish klezmer and sacred music, while his most celebrated work, La Pasión Según Marcos (St Mark Passion) - an all-singing, all-dancing crucifixion story that premiered in 2000 - mixed Gregorian chant with samba, rumba and flamenco, and ended with a kaddish, a traditional Jewish lament.
For Ainadamar, Golijov's main influence was flamenco. He wrote the first version of the opera over four months in 2003, to a libretto by the playwright David Henry Hwang. Golijov had originally intended to write an opera about conflict in the Middle East, but when inspiration was slow in coming, he turned to the story of the death of his "model and hero", the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. Ainadamar, a word derived from the Arabic for "fountain of tears", is the name of the fountain near Granada in southern Spain beside which Lorca was murdered in 1936.
After the opera's premiere at the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Tanglewood festival of contemporary music in 2003, Golijov spent six months reworking it. The final version is a lyrical, multi-layered piece that places the death and artistic legacy of Lorca alongside the final days of the Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu (played by the sublime American soprano Dawn Upshaw) in Uruguay in 1969. In Upshaw, Golijov says he finds "the rare combination of emotional truth and absolute versatility". For her part, Upshaw says: "I'm totally exhausted at the end. You have to be as truthful and vulnerable as possible, and there's no place to hide."
Emotional truth lies at the heart of Golijov's work. Yet to his critics, he is the dreaded word "crossover" made flesh, guilty of throwing together disparate musical elements in the blind hope that something might stick. Golijov himself is unabashed about this collage effect, and links it to his experience of Jewish worship. "What I took from the Jewish thing," he says, "is the possibility of creative anarchy. In the synagogues to which I went, both in Argentina and when I lived in Jerusalem, you would have somebody screaming and yelling at God, somebody mumbling, somebody being silent, somebody knocking on the wall. And as if by magic, a unison melody would come out of everybody."
In drawing on sacred music and folk melodies, Golijov is, of course, following a long-standing tradition. But, though the composers Golijov most admires (Bartók, Mussorgsky and Janácek) drew on folk tunes in order to turn them into something new, his critics think he fails to integrate them. The flamenco singer in Ainadamar may shout over the orchestra, but he never really becomes part of it.
Does Golijov think this a fair criticism? He hesitates. "I think there is always a certain degree of transformation in the music. The use of those [folk] materials . . . is the equivalent of using certain musical symbols. You have to see it in the context of what happens on top of it, below it, to the side."
His audiences certainly think so. Golijov's works carry a powerful emotional pull, and this, he says, is both why they are so popular with audiences, and why he has such a hard time with the critics in Britain. "I think British critics are afraid of emotion," he says. "They get very uncomfortable, like I am invading some private space. Whereas I think that music is emotional. Why don't you let my music resonate in people? Why is it automatically bad if people react with emotion?" His tone turns mischievous, his eyes glint behind his spectacles: "I love it," he says, "when music brings people to fistfights."
Ainadamar is performed at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham (0121-780 3333), on April 10, and at the Barbican, London (020-7638 4141), on April 13.
