Sogno di Stabat Mater was composed at Gidon Kremer’s request specifically for his recording project on the Nonesuch label. It is a shorter version of Auerbach’s Dialogues on Stabat Mater, co-commissioned by the Bremen and Lucerne Music Festivals.

The work is an experiment. On one hand, the goal was to transcribe selected movements from Pergolesi’s celebrated masterpiece into a concerto grosso for violin, viola and chamber orchestra while remaining truthful to the spirit of the original work: a sacred vocal work transformed into an abstract instrumental one.

On the other hand, the work creates a frame, a dialogue, and an outlook from our own time on the same subject. This dialogue is based not so much on the differences between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, but on their similarities. The image of the grieving mother is universal, just as pain is universal, though its expressions may vary according to cultural or religious backgrounds.

The title’s dream-image opens the work toward ambiguity: mother and child, beginning and end, musician and audience, soli and tutti, loneliness and understanding, sacred language and the vernacular, monologue and dialogue, reality and dream.

• Pergolesi A contemporary instrumental dream after the celebrated Stabat Mater.
• Dialogue Past and present speak through a shared image of grief.
• Dream The sacred vocal source becomes an abstract instrumental vision.

Sogno di Stabat Mater stands as a concentrated counterpart to Dialogues on Stabat Mater. It preserves the essential idea of a dialogue with Pergolesi while compressing the architecture into a single twelve-minute span.

The instrumentation gives the work its distinctive transparency: violin, viola, vibraphone and string orchestra, with continuo ad libitum. The result is intimate, ritualistic and suspended between lament, recollection and dream.