Dvorak: Stabat Mater (Howard Arman) (CD, Br-Klassik)

The Stabat mater by the Bohemian composer Antonín Dvorák, well-known in its later orchestral version, was originally composed with piano accompaniment; the rarely heard original version was recorded for the new CD by BR KLASSIK. The excellent Bavarian Radio Choir will sing under the direction of Howard Arman, accompanied on the piano by Julius Drake. The young Dvorák was a trained and experienced church musician who had graduated from the organ school in Prague and did his godly service as organist at St. Adalbert for three years. The search for truly sacred music preoccupied him from the start. Like many of his colleagues, the contemporary trend of Cäcilianism led him to an examination of the Palestrina style, and thus to a return to that more modest, less ostentatious, but contrapuntally sophisticated church music of an earlier era. As a result, a Stabat mater was created without orchestral pomp with simple piano accompaniment. The Latin prayer from the Middle Ages, which found its way into the liturgy of the Marian Feast of the Seven Sorrows and as a hymn in the Office, is an appeal to humanity – the Mother of God sees her humiliated, abused son die on the cross, stands above any denominational tradition and leaves no one untouched. Shortly before Dvorák wrote this first version of his Stabat mater between February 19 and May 7, 1876, the young family suffered a severe blow: on December 19, 1875, daughter Josefa died two days after she was born. When his eleven-month-old daughter Ruena and his three-year-old son Otakar died in August 1877, Dvo ák resumed work on the Stabat Mater, orchestrated the work and completed it on November 13th. The first performance of the later version took place on December 23, 1880 in Prague, the publication a few months later. Since then, his stabat mater has touched people all over the world; it is his most important composition in the genre of sacred music. Dvorák did not set all the stanzas of the hymn to music and chose an ensemble of four soloists, a choir and a piano. This original version from the spring of 1876, divided into seven movements, is an independent, completed work – no fragment, no draft, no piano reduction. When he composed the missing four stanzas and orchestrated his Stabat mater for a large orchestra in the autumn of 1877, he was creating a new, different work, so to speak. (The piano version was edited for the first time only a few years ago.) The present recording was made at a current concert by the Bavarian Radio Choir on March 2, 2019 in the Prinzregententheater in Munich, which attracted a great deal of attention and approval from the audience and the specialist press.