After recording Antonín Dvořák's complete Symphonies with the Czech Philharmonic, of which he was the musical director from 2012 to 2017, the great conductor Jiří Bělohlávek set out to record the religious works of his compatriot, but death interrupted his attempt. Overcome by cancer in 2017 at the age of seventy-one, he had time to record the Stabat Mater just weeks before his death, as well as the ten Biblical songs, Op. 99 that feature on this new album.
The project is taken up today by Jakub Hrůša who directed the Requiem and the Te Deum during the Prague Dvořák Festival in October 2017. Completed only a few weeks after the death of Jiří Bělohlávek, this recording takes the form of a posthumous tribute to the departed conductor.
Composed in 1890, the Requiem premiered the following year in Birmingham under the direction of Dvořák. This splendid Requiem Mass, in its sobriety, evokes both the melancholy of departure and the hope of a future life free of all despair. Generally considered as the writer's most profound work, the Requiem speaks to Dvořák's existential soul-searching as he approached his fifties. The work is shot through with a deep and sincere faith without any folk references, and magnified by a choral writing which is full of grandeur and delicate instrumentation. Dvořák, though a simple man, left in these pages a true meditation on human destiny. ©️ François Hudry/Qobuz