| The Stabat Mater of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Live, high-definition video of the entire work in concert by the San Francisco Early Music Ensemble Voices of Music. Soloists: Dominique Labelle, soprano; Meg Bragle, mezzo-soprano. In his short life, Giovanni Pergolesi composed a wide variety of music in the major genres of the time. His primary compositions were also operas, especially the new Opera Buffa (comic opera). His highly influential mini-opera, La Serva Padrona (1733) was the subject of a fierce debate in France over the future of opera, and was one of the most popular operas of the mid-18th century. The Stabat Mater, written in 1736, may have been composed for members of the secular nobility, the Cavalieri della Vergine dei Dolori, that met in Naples and commissioned a setting of the Stabat Mater every year. A few years earlier, Alessandro Scarlatti set the same text for members of the same group. Pergolesi's Stabat Mater was an immediate hit, and was copied, imitated, arranged and reprinted many times throughout Europe. When it was engraved in London in 1749, it quickly became the most frequently printed musical work in the 18th century. Deconstructing Pergolesi Despite the widespread modern appreciation of the Stabat Mater, many questions remain about how the work was intended to be performed, and much of the preparation for this concert involved the making of a new edition, in which the many extraneous dynamics and articulation markings were removed, and ... |
