Le Poème Harmonique . Vincent Dumestre

Pergolesi's 'Stabat Mater' has evolved into an emblem of eighteenth-century religious music. The intensity shown in the terminally ill composer's rendering of Mary's grief, as she sat at the foot of Jesus Christ's Cross, is totally genuine and unique. In this performance by Le Poème Harmonique, Pergolesi's masterpiece is once again set in its original multi-layered context of the eighteenth-century southern Italian music culture, complete with guitars, percussion and the folk interpretations of Gregorian heritage. Clearly, Pergolesi did not compose in a vacuum, but very subtly managed to engage elements from a wide diversity of musical traditions. Comic opera, tarantella and religion were very much intertwined in 1720s Naples. Vincent Dumestre and his enthusiastic colleagues in Le Poème Harmonique are the ideal performers for this genre of music, devoted as they are to the serious as well as the more popular early music culture. It is remarkable how, even during the eighteenth century, fertile and unexpected crossovers occurred between the religious and the profane, the exalted and the popular.