Programme
“I had been yearning to perform Dvořák’s Stabat Mater for a very long time. After more than thirty years, I wanted to engage in polemics with the conductor Karel Kovařovic, whose wonderful performance back then provoked in me an effort to stand one day on the podium and come to terms with that ten-movement song about suffering and loss, beginning with heavy, implacable sorrow and moving down a long, black corridor towards the light of paradise and a trusting Amen. (…) At Christmas I came into possession of Škréta’s painting of the Crucifixion… Unlike other depictions of a “general assembly” beneath the Cross of Christ, Škréta limits himself to the gently inclined heads of the Sacrificial Victim and of the Mother of God, whose sad eyes gaze motionlessly, fixed on Christ’s face. The two of them are alone. The other figures in the picture are in the background and are only sketchily portrayed, as if to indicate how remote the world is from us when we encounter true sorrow. And it is in such loneliness that sorrow grows into an unbearable horror. I am glad that the honour of being the interpreter of this work by Dvořák has come to me so late: when I was young, I would not have been capable of it at all, and it was truly necessary to have life experience and to know human misery for me to be able to bow down before the Stabat Mater…” (conductor Václav Talich, 1952)
