PRJCT Amsterdam and its artistic director Maarten Engeltjes present two of the greatest vocal works of the baroque era: Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus. While Vivaldi’s virtuosic piece contemplates the helplessness of people when God does not support their efforts, Pergolesi’s portrait of the weeping Mary at the Cross embodies what the “nameless” parents of a deceased child go through. In the Stabat Mater, Engeltjes’s counter-tenor blends together seamlessly and soothingly with Shira Patchornik’s soprano voice, resulting in an interpretation that is both profound and deeply relatable.

PRJCT Amsterdam is a young, innovative baroque ensemble centred around counter-tenor Maarten Engeltjes, and founded in 2017. Engeltjes is one of the most sought-after counter-tenors of today, working with several of the most esteemed early music groups and conductors. After having won multiple major baroque competitions, soprano Shira Patchornik is quickly establishing herself as an important singer on the opera and concert stage. All artists make their Pentatone debut.

For the first time with naïve, the counter-tenor Andreas Scholl joins the Accademia Bizantina and Alessandro Tampieri to present a Neapolitan programme, centred on the Virgin Mary.

Andreas Scholl and the Accademia Bizantina have for several decades enjoyed a successful musical partnership, encompassing the whole Baroque repertoire. As usual, this new album together includes both renowned and less well-known vocal and instrumental pieces. The figure of Mary, which has inspired a huge repertoire, both sacred and profane, runs through this Easter programme of exquisite affliction, virtuosic for both voice and orchestra. “Neapolitan music has a unique melodic vein and a great capacity to communicate emotion profoundly," says Alessandro Tampieri.

Thus, Vivaldi’s iconic Stabat Mater, which the German counter-tenor has enjoyed singing for many years, is placed alongside lesser-known airs from oratorios by Nicola Porpora and Leonardo Vinci, which had the character of the Virgin sung by a castrato. “I endeavour to place humanity before gender," says Andreas Scholl, “and I interpret the role of Mary with the greatest sincerity, without the slightest notion of 'travesty’. Love, despair and pain transcend the notion of gender."

We also find a Salve Regina by Pasquale Anfossi, requiring a particularly participative orchestra, a sonata by Angelo Ragazzi and a violin concerto by Pergolesi, both strongly echoing Pergolesi’s famous Stabat Mater. The solo violin parts are played by Alessandro Tampieri, first violin of the Italian ensemble, who conducts here from his instrument in the purest tradition of the Baroque orchestra.

Baroque world music – Four musicians (a Sicilian, a Catalan, a South Tyrolean of Italian origin with Slovenian roots and a Viennese) meet in Vienna to make music together out of love for Baroque and traditional music from southern Italy. Coming from all points of the compass, like the ROSA DEI VENTI – the wind rose, the sounds of violin, cello and harpsichord mingle in an intimate embrace with the intense songs of southern Italian music. With the album “ROSA DEI VENTI”, the ensemble, founded by Marinka Brecelj in 2012, draws on the rich musical tradition of southern Italy, which has its roots in various cultures. The focus is on serenades and love songs in Griko, a language that combines ancient Greek, Byzantine-Greek and Italian elements and is spoken in the Magna Graecia region of southern Italy’s Apulia (Salento) and occasionally in Sicily. The songs are part of the traditional music of the Greek colony in Italy. The songs from Sicily are touching with their rough tenderness and are reminiscent of the most diverse Oriental and Arabic influences from the Mediterranean region. The album combines music from the southern Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods with folk songs, with various versions of the tarantella adding a dance-like note to the program.

Il Prigionier Superbo was first staged on August 28, 1733. The chronicles report that the intermezzos of La Serva Padrona were so successful they overshadowed Il Prigioniero, in spite of its obvious merits. Pergolesi’s adhesion to the stylistic standards and the formal customs of his time is total and his respect for the taste of the audience entirely focused on belcanto is never in discussion. (Bongiovanni)

Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater has enjoyed enormous fame ever since the eighteenth century – Jean-Jacques Rousseau called its first movement ‘the most perfect and touching that has ever come from the pen of any composer’. There were many arrangements of the work, by Bach among others. It was performed more than eighty times at the Concert Spirituel in Paris between 1753 and 1790, in multiple versions, probably also with the participation of a choir.

After consulting several manuscripts and editions held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Julien Chauvin has chosen to record it with soprano and mezzo soloists (the equivalent of the French dessus and bas-dessus) and a two-part children’s choir: ‘The choir can play a real role in the narration of so powerful and poignant a text’, he says. This recording teams two emblematic singers of the Alpha label with the excellent Maîtrise de Radio France, of which Adèle was a member as a girl. To complement the Neapolitan masterpiece, we have a ‘sacred’ symphony by Haydn, "La Passione," probably written for Good Friday and in the same key as the Stabat.

Longstanding partners Sandrine Piau and Christophe Rousset have frequently performed the Stabat Mater, an emblematic work of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan repertory, both together and with other musicians. It was therefore a natural step for them to record this supreme masterpiece of sacred music. They are joined here by a relative newcomer to Les Talens Lyriques who has also become a regular partner with the ensemble, the American countertenor Christopher Lowrey (already heard on an Alpha album devoted to Monteverdi, Alpha 216). The programme is completed by a Beatus vir by Leonardo Leo (1694-1744), sung by Sandrine Piau, and a Salve Regina for alto by Nicola Porpora (1686-1768), two totally unknown works by two composers who were nevertheless very famous at the time – Porpora, for example, was Farinelli’s singing teacher and mentor to the youthful Haydn. Christophe Rousset finds in this music ‘an expression of very Mediterranean, very highly flavored piety, in which one moves from tears to laughter quite quickly’. Sandrine Piau sees in Leo ‘an elegance of style, a certain distance in sorrow’.

Joseph Martin Kraus, also named as the "Swedish Mozart", has been many years a shadowy existence in music history. Gluck and even Joseph Haydn saw "a real genius" in his virtuosic and nearly early-romantic works. His position as composer at the Swedish court under Gustav III made it possible to have a fixed income and a blithe creativity. This new release gives us an overall musical impression of his compositions in all genres: Beginning with the incidental music to Amphitryon, the high virtuosic Italian Cantatas, his Symphonies from different life periods, till the early String Quartets- it is clear that Gluck and Haydn were not mistaken in their assessment of his skill and prowess.

No one has described Pergolesi’s vocal works more splendidly and with more understanding than the philosopher and pedagogue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of the Dictionnaire de musique that was extremely widespread in the 19th century, when he wrote: "Here everything contributes to deepening the effect of the text: the harmony serves only to shape it more forcefully, the accompaniment embellishes it without distorting it. In a word, the whole work of art simultaneously communicates one melody to the ear and only one idea to the mind.“ This CD offers 3 Masterpieces recorded by the long time Duo Regina Klepper and Martina Borst, accompanied by the Bamberg String Quartet.