Ľubica Čekovská has composed Liberte for mezzo-soprano, chorus and orchestra for the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on 17 November 1989 in Bratislava. Recollections of the largely peaceful transition from socialism to democracy in Czechoslovakia thirty years ago are full of ambivalence for the Slovak composer. “The revolution brought us political liberation, but it has not often led to spiritual freedom. The transition gave us something, but also took something away. It gave rise to economic freedom, but it also produced egoism.” Profound doubt is the basic mood of William Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 66, which expresses discontent with the duplicitous world. Ľubica Čekovská sets a translation by Anna Sedlačková into Slovakian, and combines it with a text by the author Ján Štrasser, born in 1946 in Košice. Her composition Liberte uses the large forces of choir and orchestra in a rich texture, in a rhythmically accentuated, energetic and percussive movement structure, sometimes in a sarcastic march character, sometimes in an elegiac tone. Her commentary on the Revolution is a heterogeneous, deeply divided atmospheric picture.  

MLM
(from [t]akte 2/2019 – Elizabteh Robinson)