Two concerts in Bratislava marked the 70th anniversary of Slovakian composer Vladimír Godár. The composer’s hour-long choral/vocal cycle Mater was presented in full on 27 September, opening the season at the Slovak Philharmonic, as part of the Bratislava Music Festival, drawing together Solamente naturali, Vocal Ensemble SoLa, conductor Marek Štryncl, violinist Miloš Valent, and vocalists Iva Bittová and Hilda Gulyás. It was followed on 25 October by a performance of Godár’s Concerto Grosso at the Philharmonic from the Slovak Chamber Orchestra.
Mater is a cycle of six works for voice and chamber orchestra comprising his Stabat Mater, Magnificat, Regina coeli, Ecce puer, Maykomashmalon and Lullabies. The extraordinary talents of vocalist Iva Bittová – integral to the work’s creation and celebrated release on ECM twenty years ago - are at the centre of the work, an hour-long rumination of the subject of motherhood. Godár’s far-reaching language is a labyrinth of music memories, referencing ancient intonational patters of folk music, the textures of the baroque, and ghostly recollections of Monteverdi’s madrigals, as well as startlingly dissonant writing.
Ecce puer, for instance, (1997) is a 6-minute setting of a James Joyce poem for female voice and seven instruments – harp, harpsichord, chitarrone, and string quartet, with double bass in the place of cello. Maykomashmalon has the same baroque inflections, gaining an especially dark colouring from solo viola and the use of period strings and tuning; the solo voice sings a simple folk-like melody, setting Yiddish words from Jewish Belarusian poet Avrom Reyzen. Dormi, Jesu a 4-minute work for harp, solo soprano, and a small chorus of female voices, rarely rises above piano, with a rocking, lullaby-like melody passed back between solo soprano and female voices. It reflects the composer’s deep-rooted fascination for - and collection of - lullabies. A number of his works repeatedly explore the lullaby form, and he has even gone so far as to curate full-evening events of lullabies in his native Slovakia.
The Concerto Grosso is a 29-minute work for 12 strings and harpsichord premiered in 1987 with Cappella Istropolitana and Andrew Parrott. Like contemporaneous works from Schnittke and Górecki, it sees Godár rediscovering and reinventing baroque forms and sonorities, though its more anguished sequences and heavily divided strings also recall the work of Shostakovich and Penderecki.
The opening movement is an eerie Adagio sostenuto, with an uneasy, lamenting character, with lacerating trills lashing out violently, before retreating to more subdued, searching music. It is succeeded by a ferocious Presto e molto agitato, which opens with arpeggiated figures from the orchestra intercut with more poised, galant music from the concertante group; the succeeding section features violent interjections over a chugging, percussive melody. The finale – Ground, marked Largo e quieto – is a gently weeping chaconne, with falling figures spreading across the divided strings of the ensemble.
The Concerto Grosso was recorded by Parrott and Cappella Istropolitana in 2009, and has also been taken up by the Slovak Chamber Orchestra and, in 2012, Music Aeterna with Valentin Uryupin – watch their performance here.