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The annual Good Friday concert is always a favourite of mine. Before coming to Edmonton and becoming part of this decades-old tradition, I programmed a concert every year with choral settings around the Passion and Easter. In particular the Stabat Mater text has always resonated with me. With the Cantata Singers in Ottawa, we had a multi-year series, titled Stabat Mater, and we performed music spanning 500 years. My main resource is a collection curated by Dutch Hans van der Velden (now administered by his widow), which can be found online at www.stabatmater.info. You might enjoy reading about this project and learning about the many musical settings of this text. This week, in our 2022 edition of Good Friday with Pro Coro Canada, we will present two settings of the Stabat Mater, the first being by Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) for 10 solo voices, and the second, a contemporary setting by Scottish Nicola Burnett Smith for female voices and double bass. Nicola’s composition uses a unique text by Phil Vernon to express the grief, shock and pain felt by the entire community gathered with ‘the Mother weeping at the Cross.’ I can not get around mentioning how this text impacts me at this time with the news about the war in Eastern Europe, witnessing the atrocities brought upon the people of Ukraine. I leave you with a line from Stabat Mater which, applied to mothers (and parents) universally, rings terrifyingly true these days: Quis est homo qui non fleret Matri Christi si videret in tanto supplicio? Who is the person who would not weep seeing the Mother in such agony?
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