An intimate and affecting recording
Antonio Florio (conductor)
Maria Grazia Schiavo (soprano), Stéphanie d’oustrac (mezzo); Cappella de’ Turchini Eloquentia EL 0505
No other performers are as fully conversant with Neapolitan Baroque music as Antonio Florio and his Naplesbased ensemble, the Cappella de’ Turchini (now re-named Cappella Neapolitana). Decades of experience researching and performing the city’s musical heritage gives them the edge when it comes to understanding the kaleidoscopic range of styles that inspires Pergolesi’s work, from chant-like hymns to popular songs, pastoral drones, dances, laments, light intermezzo-style airs and tragic operatic duets. Florio strikes a fine balance between soave lyricism and articulate rhetoric, while soprano Maria Grazia Schiavo turns from fresh-voiced innocent to impassioned tragedienne. Stéphanie d’oustrac’s effortlessly straight-toned voice is nonetheless richly expressive. Both singers add stylish embellishments, fully in keeping with Baroque idiom. They’re placed in the midst of the instrumental ensemble, which in turn weaves an intricate tapestry of sound rather than providing mere accompaniment. The continuo group includes an archlute, reflecting the Neapolitan penchant for plucked strings, and a chamber organ, apt for the liturgical context.
There’s real intimacy – and ultimately, real humanity – to this chamber-like performance, which seems to build inexorably to the Quando corpus morietur, a chillingly stark reflection on mortality, with the two voices floating ethereally over spectral violins and a halting rhythmic pulse. One can almost smell the incense in the flickering candlelight of
San Luigi.
Recorded in 2005, the sound is clean and detailed (though there are a couple of audible edits), while the disc’s other two works are Pergolesi’s Salve regina and the premiere recording of Nicola
There’s real intimacy and humanity to this chamber-like performance
Porpora’s ravishingly lyrical setting of the same text. Meanwhile, before we head towards the runners-up (above), leave space on your library shelves, too, for the accounts by Emma Kirkby, James Bowman and the Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood – a radiant performance, though its purity of timbre is perhaps a shade too Anglican for Pergolesi’s distinctly Roman Catholic idiom – and Véronique Gens, Gérard Lesne and Il Seminario Musicale, a profoundly moving interpretation that distils the work’s spiritual essence, despite the overly reverberant recorded sound.