My Dialogues on Stabat Mater for violin, viola and chamber orchestra is based on Pergolesi’s famous work, with contemporary interludes — musical dialogues conceived as prayers, commentaries and personal reactions to its movements: modern souls responding to the Stabat Mater. It is also a dialogue between Past and Present, between prayer and the transformation created by prayer — a personal connection to the Stabat Mater from the perspective of our own time.

Dialogues on Stabat Mater is an experiment. I wanted to create a frame, a dialogue, an outlook from our own time on the same subject as Pergolesi’s celebrated masterpiece, and to base this dialogue not so much on the differences in cultural and harmonic aesthetics between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, but rather on their similarities — which is far more challenging. The image of the grieving mother is universal, just as pain is universal, although its expressions may vary according to cultural or religious traditions.

A dialogue can happen on many different levels. Is it a dialogue between different times, between a beginning and an end, musician and audience, soli and tutti, loneliness and understanding? Perhaps, after all, the distance is not so great between vocal and purely instrumental music, between sacred language and the vernacular, between monologue and dialogue. Every prayer is a dialogue, even when the addressee does not appear to be present. To whom am I addressing this?

— Lera Auerbach

Written for violin, viola, vibraphone and string orchestra, Dialogues on Stabat Mater transforms the concerto grosso principle into a space of spiritual commentary. The solo instruments do not simply decorate the string body; they become voices of reflection, interruption, prayer and memory.

The eight movements form a sequence of contrasting states: moderated lament, nostalgia, agitation, dramatic weight and urgent motion. Through these changing surfaces, the work remains bound to a single central image: grief contemplated across centuries.

The result is neither a reconstruction of Pergolesi nor a rejection of him, but a living conversation: a sacred memory heard through the fractured sensibility of the present.