Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater has enjoyed enormous fame ever since the eighteenth century – 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 or Hiller 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.