It won't be anything new if I say that we're living in an age of the relativisation of values, in times of uncertainty, coarseness, arrogance, but above all universal passivity (the silent majority) and lack of interest in the things around us. e quality of education is not rising, rather the contrary. White is publicly proclaimed to be black, and vice versa. A person who today still believes in some “good and evil” seems not to belong to this world. Is it possible for us to live in it, know what it is, and yet at the same time love it and try to bring to it something of value? Can one exist in this world without cynicism, contempt and humiliation? Despite everything that's happening around us, amidst which we live our daily lives, we long to touch something, experience something, that is positive, pure, beautiful, truthful and meaningful. Something that transcends us. But does any such thing still have a place here? Is there any point? Will someone still listen to it? When in February of this year, with many of my friends, I listened to the fteen Shostakovich quartets performed by the splendid Brodsky Quartet (it was a fairly long time since I'd been sitting and listening and not playing), I had a personal feeling of ful lment and a longing for this to go on. at it should not end. I didn't have enough of it. at music swallowed me up completely, transcended me, opened up new worlds, spaces, doors...

Music is a gift that's hard to describe. I cannot express in words my gratitude for the fact that there is music. Music, meeting musicians and meeting you, the public, who become part of creating it from the moment you enter the hall – that is a powerful motivation for us after seventeen years to go on further, to seek and to provide those evenings of Convergences again and again. By doing so I don't suppose we will change the socio-political climate we live in, but together we can create a place for repose, drawing breath, recuperating, letting the soul rest, and also perhaps reinforcing the spirit and gaining the strength to continue onwards in everyday life in a meaningful way. Maybe I have exaggerated expectations, but if some of us at least say after the festival, “I didn't have enough of it”, the mission could be ful lled...

jozef LUPTÁK