Mater is a new cantata in seven movements that are set for ensembles of different sizes, from a three-part voice, viola, and cello to a full-sized string orchestra and choir. Also included are the period instruments chitarrone and harpsichord, making for a most interesting and quite convincingly robust tonal idiom. The work was composed over a ten-year period using Latin and Slovak texts, Yiddish and Christian sources, employing sacred and profane music with the guiding principle of a consoling and protecting “mother” element, from one of a typology of a human mother weeping for her lost children to that of the adoration of the supreme religious mother, the Virgin Mary.
The movement “Maykomashmalom” bookends the composition, with “Lullabies”, “Ecce puer”, “Stabat mater”, “Queen of Heaven” following in sequence. The music is highly moving, emotionally affecting, and features an earth-bound tonality that can rock you to your roots in its unaffected elegance. Glimmers of melody pop up like familiar sweet smells, with accompanying rhythmic devices that feel so natural, yet sound so modern as to confound our normal expectations. For we know that this type of music, so bound to the structures of the past, should not be able to withstand some of the contemporary anachronisms that are thrust upon it, yet somehow they do; the feeling that Godár creates is one of a discovery, of a revelation of some sort of long-lost, integrally time-bound music that we have simply overlooked. Yet its very presentation disowns that theory, and though aware of its contemporary nature, we are more apt to listen with renaissance and baroque ears than with those subject to Webern and Mahler.
This is music that invites, even demands reflection, and yet passes as quickly as if reading a page-turner novel. You cannot but help being drawn into Godár’s intensely lyrical and profoundly touching, disturbing, and consoling world. This is what music should be—an elemental force that resonates in the depths of the human psyche.
Godár was born in Bratislava in 1956, and was drawn to the renaissance masters despite his admiration for the avantgarde and its ilk. Berio, Ligeti, Xenakis, and Lutoslawski, despite imparting many worthy lessons, ultimately gave way to Machaut, Dufay, and Ockeghem. The celebrated soprano Ivo Bittová has worked with the composer on many projects, and leads the ensemble here in a fervent, completely natural reading that seems second nature. All the forces involved play as if it were the only music left in the world, and the typical ECM sound allows for great absorption and resonance. This is easily one of the highlights of the classical year, and I urge you to acquire this disc.
— Steven Ritter
