Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

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Stabat Mater
Laudate Pueri

Valer Barna-Sabadus · Terry Wey
Neumeyer Consort · Ensemble Barock Vokal, Mainz
Michael Hofstetter, conductor

If we first introduced Valer Barna-Sabadus with a solo CD in January, we can now present him in an ensemble: with Pergolesi‘s Stabat Mater – sung by two countertenors. Here is a brief explanation why Michael Hofstetter decided on these forces:

“All the contemporary witnesses owed the deep impression made on them by Pergolesi‘s church music to the singing of castrati. As often and willingly as Stabat Mater is sung and heard with women’s voices today, it was the pure, ethereal voices of two castrati who first lent the proper expression to the gallant pain of Pergolesi’s Passion sequence. Michael Hofstetter and the two young singers on this recording liberate his music from the cliché of a thoroughly soft music of sentimental feelings. The vocal lines come to life thanks to the typical manners of the castrati: the short grace notes, slides, trills and the ‘messa di voce’.” Dr. Karl Böhmer