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Parcival in Groningen

It is 8 pm and silence descends on the main auditorium of the Oosterpoort Theatre in Groningen (The Netherlands). On stage, a few hundred young people aged between 16 and 18 are lined up behind an orchestra. The youths are the students of the 10th, 11th and 12th grade of the Parcival College in Groningen, which is the school my niece’s children attend. The Parcival College educates the students according to the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, who founded the anthroposophy movement.

The conductor, one of the teachers, ascends the stage. The orchestra begins to play and the voices join in. Enthralled, I listen to Verdi’s Stabat Mater. This short but complex piece is the opening of the concert, an annual performance in the week before Easter in which all 900 students and over 100 staff participate. The students know the words by heart and the enthusiasm in their voices as they sing is deeply moving. Later in the evening they perform Ramirez’ Missa Criolla. In between, the pop choir of the 7th grade perform songs from different era’s in various styles and languages. The 9th grade sing songs in Dutch, which they wrote themselves. The highlight of the evening is the percussion session of the 8th grade. The setting is an airport: people are going on holidays, are waiting on a loved one, and someone is in a rush to catch a plane. There are business people, pilots, mechanics and adventurers. We are brought on a journey by the students, who choreographed the performance and wrote all the rhythms themselves. They use not only drums, but also a selection of different objects, such as shopping trolleys, suitcases, umbrellas and bicycle pumps. It sounds great and it is very entertaining to watch. I came for Verdi’s Stabat Mater, but the whole programme was very impressive and surprising. It was a wonderful evening, thanks to the Parcival College.

Stabat Sistine Chapel, Live-streamed

Mr. Marc Puckett from Oregon (US) was so kind to inform me about the performance of Sir James MacMillan’s Stabat Mater by British choir The Sixteen on April 22th. This concert will be live-streamed from the Sistine Chapel of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It will be the first ever concert to be live-streamed from the Vatican! Read More at the site of Britten Sinfonia or the Genesis Foundation.
Thank you Mr. Pucket!

The end of an era

Visiting Oirschot for the annual Stabat Mater event has been a real highlight of the calendar, since its inception in 1999. This year the Stabat Mater foundation celebrated their 20th anniversary on the 17th and 18th March. We enjoyed the romantic Stabat Mater by Rheinberger and the Dutch premiere of James MacMillans composition, composed in 2016.
The concerts have always been of high quality:  impressive, surprising and moving. In the last twenty years Stabat Maters by 37 different composers were performed,  with compositions ranging from 15th and 16th century works by Josquin Desprez and Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina to very modern works by composers such as Hawar Tawfiq (2013) and James MacMillan (2016). The Iraqi composer Hawar Tafique was commissioned to compose a Stabat Mater to celebrate the Foundation’s  15th  anniversary.  Daan Manneke  composed the Stabat Mater for the Foundation’s 10th anniversary in 2013. As all performances were recorded on CD, we were able to add new composers to our collection. This included not only Manneke and Tafique, but also Wüllner, Fiocco, Dvořák (for piano), Dohnányi and several others.
Unfortunately, this year’s event was the final Stabat Mater concert organised by the foundation.  It makes me sad and a bit melancholic. For us it means the end of an era. Nevertheless I am grateful for twenty years of Stabat Maters in the St. Petrus Church in Oirschot, which connected the audience with performances that were moving and comforting. I am certain that the efforts of the Foundation in organising these concerts have contributed to the appreciation and love of the Stabat Mater, not only in Brabant, but in the entire Netherlands.

Gaudium et Musica on Menorca

In 2010 I added the Stabat Mater by Marco Rosano to my collection. Marco Rosano was so kind to send me the studio recording as well as the Australian recording on DVD. The audio cd is available on Amazon.com. I love this composition very much and I was so surprised to get an e-mail from Ana Gomila Domènech from Menorca (Spain). She is the singer of Gaudium et Musica, a Spanish ensemble of Early Music, and they are playing (among others) three parts of Marco Rosano’s Stabat Mater on March 18th in Menorca’s Cathedral.
Ana had listened to the Marco Rosano Stabat Mater at Radio Clásica, in Spain. The first piece that she  heard was “O quam tristis”. She loved it so much, it was really very touching to her, so she shared it with her partners of Gaudium et Musica.

She wrote me:
we have a principal singer -that’s me, Ana Gomila- and a secondary one, Xavi Martín, he plays flute and guitar. I sing all pieces of our repertory and he does the second voice in some pieces. You can listen a complete concert from us if you looking for “Gaudium et Musica in concert” in my blog or in my personal YouTube channel.
Listen to their O quam tristis et afflicta. Thanks Ana!

Pergolesi for piano solo

As you can see on my Pergolesi webpage, I have about twenty versions of the Pergolesi Stabat Mater. I have several CD’s with the original classical version for two soloists or two soloists and choir and versions with a full-bodied string orchestra. Very special is the saxophone quartet-version (by Saxo Panico) and the interpretation of the Victor Alcántara Trio, they recorded an extended jazz improvisation, in which all parts of the Stabat Mater are used as starting points. The well-known producer Frank Fitzpatrick produced a CD in a kind of hip-hop style for the singer Sasha Lazard, with a Stabat Mater composition by him, based on Pergolesi. The first and last parts of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater have been used in the soundtrack of the movie “Jésus de Montréal”; the third part (Quis est homo) is used in the soundtrack of the movie “Smilla’s Sense of Snow”; the last part is also used in the movie “Amadeus” and in the movie “Mirror” by Andrei Tarkovsky.
But this week I will add a piano version of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. It was sent to me (for free) by Orlando Romulo Sanchez. He is the manager of  concert pianist, Marie-Louise Hinrichs.  She recently recorded her own solo piano transcription of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. I love it very much! In the CD booklet she says:

The Stabat Mater of Pergolesi has fascinated me from the beginning: both the powerful lyrics and also the music, which not only underlines effectively, but has independently in itself as well as a great effect. The music is so deeply touching that I felt a great desire to play this on the piano and to rewrite the music. Whilst I was rewriting I had periods of great enthusiasm for the work, yet there were also days, when I could not even continue, because of a deep sadness that had seized me…

You will also find five sonata’s by Scarlatti on the CD. Thanks Romulo and Marie-Luise!

Irish Gaelic 3.0

I was very happy to receive a mail from Tom Dawkes about the transcription that was made by my grandson from the original Irish Gaelich. See Irish Gaelic 2.0. This is what Tom told me:

…I was delighted to come upon it (my site, ho) by chance. I had been listening to a BBC programme of words and music, which included a setting of part of the Stabat in Polish by Karol Szymanowski. I looked this up on Google and one of the top hits was to your website. It was interesting to see Irish as one of the languages covered, since I studied Irish many years ago — although not to any great level — and I saw at once that the text you had included was not quite right. Without going into too many details — Irish has a particular way of writing which includes a n accent to show long vowels, so á, é, í, ó, ú, and also uses h after consonants to show a different pronunciation: c , for example,sounds like English or Dutch k, but ch sounds like Dutch g. The older Irish writing used a dot above the letter to show these changes, as with ċ. 
I’ve gone through the text and tried to correct where it is obviously wrong, looking up words where I could, so I think the text I have produced is nearer correct — but I can’t say for sure 100% accurate! 
I’ve attached a Word document and a PDF version of my version, and also a plain text, in case this is easier to work with for your site. With any luck, a real Irish speaker may see it and make any necessary corrections…
I have updated the webpage with the Irish Gaelic translation, thanks to Tom Dawkes.

 

Carlos Garcia, Portugese composer

Mr. Carlos Garcia from Portugal kindly contacted me about the Stabat Mater he composed in 2013. Carlos Garcia graduated in Music Education and Jazz (Piano) from the School of Music of Lisbon (ESML – Lisbon College of Music). He studied clarinet, organ, composition analysis and techniques, and orchestral conducting. He worked at the School of Music of the National Conservatory for eight years, teaching Introduction to Music and Music Education, and conducted several children and youth orchestras. He currently works as an assistant professor at ESML, in the Choir Conducting, Music Education and Music in the Community Courses.
Mr. Garcia composed two sacred works: Missa Breve (2011) and Stabat Mater (2013), both for choir and string orchestra. His Stabat Mater was performed in 2013 in Lisbon by Coro Ricercare e Orquestra Sinfonietta de Lisboa, conducted by Vasco Pearce de Azevedo.

Mr. Carlos Garcia wrote to me about his Stabat Mater:

The text portrays in an intense way the pain of those who accompany the brutal suffering and threshold of a brother/son at the time of death. For a mother who is deeply acquainted with the life of this special son, the anguish experienced at this moment is dramatic, yet mysteriously clothed with transcendent love. Besides the contemplation made by the poet to the pain of Mary in the first 8 stanzas, this search still, throughout the text, to take part of this pain. Through Mary, and with the poet’s dedication to this experience, at the end there is the request to Christ for the entrance into paradise. The composition of music for this poem was thought in a unique way, so that the text is sung without repetitions, in order to dignify each word, stanza or group of stanzas with a color of their own. Because it is a poem of a meditative character, there is a certain rhythmic fidelity to the tranquil spirit of the slow times of medieval and Renaissance polyphony. The melodic motif presented in the sopranos at the beginning of the play is recurring over time with subtle variations. The most expressive words were filled with harmonic colors of larger tension and resonance.

What a pity!

On Saturday September 30th I visited a concert by PRJCT AMSTERDAM in the Philharmonie in Haarlem (the Netherlands). They performed among others the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi, Maarten Engeltjes and Rosemary Joshua were the soloists. Of course, I always love to listen to Stabat Mater concerts but I had chosen this performance because of the collaboration with a Dutch writer, Thomése, who red several pieces from his book Schaduwkind (Shadow Child) about the loss of his infant child.
First things first: I must say I enjoyed this evening a lot, I loved the playing and the singing, especially Maarten Engeltjes, a Dutch countertenor, who has a heavenly voice.

However, after the break I got a bit distracted because of the text in the music programme. The original Latin text and the Dutch translation of Stabat Mater had been literally copied from the Ultimate Stabat Mater site, without my permission and without mentioning the source!
That Dutch translation has been made by my late husband Hans van de Velden, the initiator of the site. I recognized it immediately, through the text between brackets and printed in Italic, (please see for example section 10 and 11 of Pergolesi in the programme).
(Forgive me for a small “technical” elaboration:) Two versions of the Latin text exist: the “Analecta”-version and the “Vatican”-version. The last one differs on several points from the “Analecta”- version. In his Stabat Mater composition Pergolesi used the “Analecta”-version of the text (with the exception of line 2 in stanza 16). In the programme of PRJCT you will find the “Analecta”-version but (!) with between brackets and in Italic the Vatican variations. Exactly as you find it on the Ultimate Stabat Mater Website. Both versions have been translated into Dutch by my husband. He explains some things about the text and translation. Please have a look at https://www.stabatmater.info/dutch/.
It happens many times that concert organizations from US or Europe ask me permission for using a translation (Hans also made an English translation), in their concert programme.  Of course, that’s all right for me if only the source of the translation is mentioned. I regret that this has not been happened this time and besides that the translation in the concert programme  was so clumsy (with the Vatican alternative between brackets). What a pity!

Two Italian Stabats

I added two new contemporary composers from Italy: Alberto Schiavo and Stefano Lentini. Alberto Schiavo contacted me to inform about his compostion from 2016. He was so kind to send me the files and some more information. Lentini’s Stabat Mater(2013), has been composed for the movie The Grandmaster (2013) by Wong Kar-Wei. It is only 3.02 minutes! The Grandmaster is a Hong Kong-Chinese martial arts drama film based on the life story of the Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man. The film was directed and written by Wong Kar-wai and stars Tony Leung as Ip Man.

Stabat Mater and Stab at Matter

I had never heard of Bruce Cockburn till Bob Cox sent me an e-mail about his last album Bone on Bone. From Wikipedia I learned Bruce Cockburn is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist. His song styles range from folk to jazz-influenced rock and his lyrics cover a broad range of topics that reveal a passion for human rights, environmental issues, politics, and spirituality. Cockburn has written more than 300 songs on thirty albums over a career spanning 40 years. He has sold nearly one million albums in Canada alone.
The album Bone on Bone  has a song titled Stab at Matter. I listened to this song several times and analyzed the text. Is Stab at Matter a parody on Mary near the cross?  A wordplay on the ancient Latin hymn? Or a modern interpretation of the 13th-century hymn Stabat Mater? I think it is intended as a spiritual song, regardless I like it. Please, judge for yourself!

you got lamentation
you got dislocation
sirens wailing and the walls come down
you got revelation
you got felt relation
door creaks open and the trumpet sounds
we’re taking a stab at matter
taking a stab at matter
taking a stab at matter
set the spirit free
we’re taking a stab at matter
taking a stab at matter
taking a stab at matter
set the spirit free
you got incantation
you got quantum vibration
temple trembles as the Lord draws nigh
you got transformation
thunder shaking
seal is broken and the spirit flies
we’re taking a stab at matter
taking a stab at matter
taking a stab at matter
set the spirit free
we’re taking a stab at matter
taking a stab at matter
taking a stab at matter
set the spirit free

In 1997 I created the Ultimate Stabat Mater website for Hans with the program FrontPage. At that time he had around 40 Stabat Mater CDs. His notes on the composer, the music, the texts and translations and the different versions all came online. After this he managed the site by adding new composers and translations regularly. At the time of his death in 2005 he had 211 Stabat Maters. After his death I continued collecting the information and managing the site. I wish to thank the Dutch Stabat Mater Foundation which gave me the financial support in 2014 to renew this site!