Customer Reviews

Pergolesi - Stabat Mater / M. Marshall · Valentini-Terrani · LSO · Abbado

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This CD is well known in Europe and has consistently recieved rave reviews.

The clarity of the recording, the quality of the voices and their balance give it a haunting quality. The whole recording is well paced and to the point, nothing unnecessary has been added allowing the music to stand on its own.

This recording evokes an emotional response every time I listen to it. It is the perfect music for Sunday morning and such a pleasure to listen to. It is by far the best recording of the Stabat Mater I have ever heard and I highly recommend it.

Pergolesi's Stabat Mater is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful pieces in classical music. Like Mozart, he had so much poise and passion at such a young age (he composed this work in his mid 20's). I have heard several versions of Stabat Mater but my absolute favorite is the London Symphony Orchestra's (conducted by Claudio Abbado). Soprano Margaret Marshall and Contralto Lucia Valentini Terrani are both superb and angelic in this performance especially in the final track (Quando corpus morietur), which totally enraptures the listener.

I was quite surprised to read in the notes how young Giovanni Pergolesi was when he wrote this music. It is no surprise to have good music written by Wunderkinds. Witness Mozart and a half dozen other prodegies. But Mozart didn't write really inspiring liturgical works until his late twenties and thirties. This piece is simply 'divine', especially for a mass which is neither a general mass nor a requiem. I have not heard any other performances, but to my amateur ears, this one sound just great.

I have almost all recordings of this piece in my collection. None equals this one. I don't even know how to describe the experience of listening to this recording. Mystical? Otherwordly? Meditative? Sheer beauty? Maybe all of those qualities together: a spiritual experience on top of the mere aesthetic one.
Every nuance of this beautiful piece comes out in this performance. The singing, the orchestra, and the conducting are sublime and of the highest quality. One of my all-time favorite record!

Some say is theatrical interpretation, if so, is at the highest degree of interpretation. I don't like opera music, but I like some oratorios and this is probably one of the most evocating if not the most.

I own this CD for over 6 years already, and I play it back again and again. And I still buy and give it away as a present for many friends and family.

Sound quality is OK, but I would kill for a good digital transfer remasterization.

One name: MARGARET MARSHALL...! femenine, spiritual, delicate, accurate, never corny: Supreme.

I have read such a lot of tendentious rubbish about various recordings of this simplest, most celebrated and sublime masterpiece that I though it might be enlightening to attempt a comparison across three disparate versions of it, each representing one, particular, entrenched interpretative camp. That's difficult; there are so many to choose from and so many have merit, as this music can survive a whole range of approaches, but I plumped for these three: Alessandri on the Naive label (cutting edge HIP; slimmer voices); Abbado (old-fashioned, traditional, big-sound; singers operatic with vibrato); and Rousset (compromise: original instruments but more relaxed tempi and somewhat more operatic voices). I am amused at some of the more condescending pronouncements made de haut en bas by the "period Nazis"; we really do not always know a) how the music sounded when it was first played; b) what the composer actually wanted; c) what he would have liked - which is not necessarily the same thing as point "b"! In the end we must forget dogma and say what moves us today.

The results of my comparison are necessarily subjective and skewed to my ears and taste, but I thought they might be of interest to anyone picking their way through the plethora of choices available.

All enjoy beautiful sound and I don't propose to waste much time on that. Regarding tempi, the Alessandri goes to extremes, sometimes breathlessly fast ("Quae moerebat")and sometimes lugubriously clumsy and plonking (opening movement "Stabat mater") with heavy accents on the first beat of every bar. The Abbado is Romantically leisurely and inclined to lack contrast, but the suspended harmonies of that famous opening have a stately grandeur which instantly transports the listener into a spiritual realm. Rousset is inclined to rush but represents a juste milieu between the other two and his "period accents" are more discreet than those of Alessandri. Orchestral accompaniment: obviously Abbado has big band but it does not by any means overwhelm his singers. Alessandri has a small, period band with its usual concomitant characteristics: lean, slightly vinegary string tone and great clarity. Rousset's original instruments seems to me to strike the right balance between amplitude and delicacy, being both sweeter and more yielding than those of Alessandri but obviously not as thick of texture as Abbado's LSO.

Finally, the singers: all three versions are decidedly well sung. Gemma Bertagnolli is neither as famous nor as lustrous-voiced as all the other singers concerned and it shows a little in the ordinariness of her vocal quality; both Margaret Marshall and Barbara Bonney are superior in bell-like clarity and limpid beauty of tone. I disagree with the complaints of some previous reviewers: neither of these latter two has so slow a vibrato that either intonation or harmonisation with the alto is obscured, and they do make concessions to the period. Mingardo has a lovely voice and copes remarkably well with the absurdly rushed tempo in the aforementioned "Quae moerebat", but that speed is wholly inappropriate to the emotion expressed by the text and I am a sucker for Scholl's and Valenti-Terrani's resonant, oboe-tones, especially as their conductors permit them more apt tempi. Scholl and Bonney also occasionally introduce some discreet ornamentation and lovely trills.

If you want a strictly authentic performance and also want the Vivaldi "Stabat mater" (surely no more than a workaday filler compared with Pergolesi's supreme work), you must go for the Alessandri; otherwise I prefer even the rather stolid Abbado purely for the quality of the singing and its sincerity of utterance and I wouldn't part with this disc, as it was the one which first introduced me to this music. The best of the three, however, remains the much-lauded Rousset/Scholl/Bonney version.

You'll find at least four other reviews of this CD here on amazon, all of which give it five stars. Am I intimidated by being the odd person out? Not in this case. This recording is the best evidence in the world of the superiority of 'historically informed performance' on original-period instruments, sung in an appropriate style.

Listen to the samples! Don't waste your money on buying the CD for comparative purposes. You'll hear that both singers - soprano Marshall and contralto Valentini-Terrani - employ steady, wide, unrelenting vibratos. The result is that lugubrious warble associated with "fat lady" jokes. Aside from the preposterous ugliness of such a vocal technique, when used for Baroque music, the vibrato completely obscures the tuning of the relatively 'open' chords of which this music is composed. It's worse when the two singers attempt the duet movements; the whole effect of the organum-like harmonies, chiefly parallel thirds, is destroyed by the interference patterns of two rippling vibratos over lapping each other. However, to be utterly blunt, even with the aid of vibrato, neither singer is even close to consistently in tune with her own intervals, let alone with the orchestra.

And an orchestra it is! NOT a basso continuo, with obbligato instruments! In fact, the organ basso continuo only occasionally penetrates the congestion of the orchestra, giving me "where did that come from" shock. It's muddy, it's turgid, it's 'in tune' only by committee consensus.

Claudio Abbado, perhaps to give his singers acoustic space for their vocal wobbling, takes the most sluggish tempi in most of the movements of any recording I've heard. He also lurches melodramatically into his frequent chorale-like fermatas. It's clear that he 'hears' the Stabat Mater only as a dirge, and not as a prayer for empathy and intercession, which it should be, and a paean of love for the Mother of Sorrows. His is a stodgy Sunday concert hall interpretation, without of flicker of stained-glass illumination.