Vivaldi: Stabat Mater, RV621

Outstanding!
Early Music Review

“This release in Robert King's complete cycle of Vivaldi's church music mainly features works unconnected with the Ospedale della Pietà, including a motet written in Rome and the famous Stabat mater composed for a church in Brescia. All are for solo voice or voices and orchestra, and for the most part they all carry the typical Vivaldi trademarks: boisterous energy alongside a tender if angular lyricism; a vivid and excitable responsiveness to verbal imagery; and what the insert-notes describe as 'a shocking radicalism: a willingness to strip music down to its core and reconstitute it from these simplest elements'. The best works on this disc are the first three. In turbato mare is a rip-roaring 'simile' motet which makes use of the old operatic device of comparing a troubled soul to a stormtossed ship finding peace in port. The noble Nonin pratis aut in hortis is an introduzione, a short motet designed to precede a performance of a lost Miserere; since it ends on a half-close, it's followed here (with musical if not liturgical logic) by the Stabat mater. All are excellently sung; few recordings exist of the first two, but it's hard to imagine the ebulliently virtuosic Susan Gritton and the movingly firm-voiced Jean Rigby being significantly bettered. By contrast, the Stabat mater is well-trodden territory, but the warmly mellifluous Robin Blaze easily matches his rivals on disc. The King's Consort is a little raw in the string department, but in general it shows bright and lively form and is well served by an acoustic perfectly suited to the occasion. Under King's direction, too, they capture splendidly the spirit of this uncomplicated but atmospheric music.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Robin Blaze sings with passion and raw honesty, and delivers plenty of sweetly contoured coloratura. The King's Consort boldly play with resonance and passion.” Gramophone Magazine, October 2007

“Here's a very attractively prepared menu whose main course is the Stabatmater for countertenor and strings.
Hors-d'oeuvres and side-dishes consist of a ripieno concerto (RV114), a chamber cantata for countertenor and strings (RV684), a string sonata in E flat (RV130) and an introductory motet to a lost Miserere (RV638). Taken together, the pieces demonstrate something of Vivaldi's diverse style as a composer.
The chamber cantata, if closely related to the two sacred vocal items on the disc in respect of tonal colour, differs from them in character.
Conforming with the standard Italian cantata pattern at the time of two pairs of alternating recitative and da capo aria Vivaldi enlivens his pastoral idyll with two particularly affecting arias, the first with a palpitating pizzicato violin, the second a virtuoso vocal tour de force illustrating the plight of the forsaken lover. Andreas Scholl brings the whole thing off superbly with only a moment's faulty intonation at the close of the first aria. Unlike settings of the Stabat mater by Pergolesi and others, Vivaldi used only the first 10 of the 20 stanzas of the poem. His deeply expressive setting of the poem will be familiar to many readers, but few will have heard such an affecting performance as Scholl achieves here.
The lyrical prayer of human yearning for faith contained in the 'Fac ut ardeat' movement is tenderly sung and here, as throughout the programme, sympathetically supported by Ensemble 415 under Chiara Banchini's experienced direction.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010