Fleischmann Choir and CMSO Orchestra                                      Cork City Hall 18th February 2017

The Stabat mater – a 13th-century poem that describes in 20 verses the imagined sufferings of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross – has attracted a select but significant range of composers over the centuries, from Palestrina and Vivaldi, through Rossini and Howells to Karl Jenkins. Most settings hover around the 40-minute mark (for example Pergolesi’s and Poulenc’s); Jenkins’s stretches to just over an hour. But the biggest-boned of all settings is surely Dvořák’s, broken down into 10 wondrously varied – but also wholesomely coherent – movements. It was begun in 1876, with just a piano accompaniment, in memory of his daughter Josefa, who had died two days after her birth the previous year. The full score was completed in 1877 following the deaths of another daughter, R≤ena, and Dvořák’s first-born son, Otakar. With such a terrible burden of personal grief and loss hanging over the work’s genesis, coupled with what Eduard Hanslick called ‘the tear-laden monotony’ of the text, one might have expected a work full of gloom and despondency. But Dvořák rose above these personal and technical challenges to create a highly sensuous statement of personal faith and belief clothed in symphonic robes, which culminates in a dramatic ‘Amen’.[Source: Gramophone]

AUDIO ARCHIVE  - PUCCINI MESSA DI GLORIA