Pergolesi: Stabat Mater

In 1976, Barbara Hendricks discovered the Pergolesi Stabat Mater when she performed it on a last-minute replacement engagement in Paris.Though impressed with the work, she never sang it again before programming it in 2007 during concerts in Morocco and in France. Since then, it has become a mainstay of her concert repertoire which she has performed from Sweden to Japan. Since the time of its creation in 1735, Pergolesi's last work has been considered an emblem for perfection and the expressive beauty of 18th-century Italian music. It assured the composer an immediate posthumous reputation which inaugurated the myth of the young, genius musician who died too young. On the eve of the tercentenary of his birth in 2010, Barbara Hendricks, accompanied by Ulrika Tenstam and the DBE, have recorded his Stabat Mater, together with the exquisite chamber cantata Orfeo, in which recitative precedes two magnificent arias, revealing Pergolesi to be a fine composer of opera. Ulrika Tenstam is an artist of wide range both vocally as well as dramatically, since her remarkable debut as Clytemnestra in Gluck's Iphigenie en Aulide at Drottningholm. Ms Tenstam has appeared with such renowned conductors as Arnold Östman, Franz Welzer Möst, Neeme Järvi and Antonio Pappano.

Pergolesi Year 2010 celebrates the birth 300 years ago of a first rank composer whose death at 26 robbed music of a singular voice.

Autumn’s 2009 release of this first volume of a three album all-Pergolesi project, featuring Orchestra Mozart conducted by Claudio Abbado, whets the appetite for succeeding volumes while creating buzz for the commemoration year itself.

25 years after recording the Stabat Mater, Pergolesi’s most popular piece, Maestro Abbado unveils his new vision of this sublime score with a cast of splendid singers.

Playing a priceless Guarneri Giuliano Carmignola, winner of Germany’s Echo award and the French Diapason d’or, records Pergolesi’s Violin Concerto for the first time.

During his short life of 26 years, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi produced two works that have ensured his name lives on as one of the great Baroque composers: the comic opera La serva padrona (The Maid as Mistress) and the Stabat Mater recorded on this CD. He wrote much more music – sadly the bulk of this is lost and after his death the heavy demand for his music lead to publishers passing off works by lesser composers as being by Pergolesi. Recent study has suggested that of the 150 works published in his name, only about one in five is a genuine Pergolesi. The Stabat Mater was composed in the last two months of his life, in 1736 at the Franciscan monastery near Pozzuoli. Initially the work attracted criticism as it cast conventional religious musical styles aside, and, to many listeners, it sounded more like operatic music set to a religious text. It is possible to detect the world of opera in some of the numbers, but the critics were being unfair. The predominating minor key gives the work a serious character befitting the text. What Pergolesi achieved was to tie music and text together in an emotional bond that is both very effective and touching.The work was published with many examples of the tampering that afflicted much of Pergolesi’s music. For example, oboes were added to the score. This recording is of the original version.

"Harnoncourt is … "attentive to every possible detail … there is much to enjoy." Gramophone

A classic of Baroque music, the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi (he wrote it when he was twenty-four and he died two years later) is a constant source of emotion. This superb recording by Rinaldo Alessandrini brings out all the beauty and expression of this work.