I'd have called the disc Stabat Mater if I'd been him. This title is somehow resonant of a bereavement card available in the High Street or a book of comforting verses by Patience Strong. The project was to commission new settings of the desolate poetry once set to best effect by Pergolesi. It must have been quite an accolade to be asked. The text isn't quite the same for each setting, although the opening lines must be adhered to or you might not be able to call it a Stabat Mater.
Alissa Firsova finds an austerity that it is to be admired. I can't get involved in Tonu Korvits on third or fourth hearing but Claudio Casciolini brings something more hymnal, harmonic and flowing with a responsary structure and perhaps a nod to the Renaissance masters like Josquin in his line that makes his version the preference for me and then I look and find his dates are 1697-1760 and so he can't be the one I pick from the contemporary composers to praise for his retro chic. And so it is Matthew Martin (born 1976) whose setting has something of James MacMillan about it, not quite such a distant reference point but still a fine one, and one isn't too surprised to see that Jimmy was one of the small committee that issued the invitations to contribute.
Matthew Martin is organist at the Brompton Oratory, somewhere on a long list of places in London I really ought to make the effort to go to, and so perhaps I ought to be investigating when he is going to be playing and how to get there.
But, inevitably really, although one surely buys the disc to hear the new music and what can still be done with the text, it is the Domenico Scarlatti finale, occupying 23.24 of the 68.45 of it that is the piece that will be played more than all the others put together. I don't think it is that one feels safe with Scarlatti and challenged by the more recent interpretations. It is just better, not only because it is warmer, more intricate and gorgeous but it is raised by those things to a more poignant sadness- and it is 'poignant' that the Stabat Mater is about. There are flights of angels in the singing here.
We do seem to be living in dark times, comfortable though many of us are. And D. Scarlatti 'had the status of a courtier' in Madrid and presumably wasn't hard up in Rome when he wrote this, either. Apparently, it was a 'backward-looking' thing at the time, which is probably why you might hear Monteverdi in it. But, if music has struggled through the pains of modernism and emerged fitter, more knowing and the wiser for it, it is only just a bit regrettable that, despite the attempt, it wasn't possible to find some more inventive, less inhibited or perhaps academic new music to offer up against Domenico to show that we are still up to the challenge because Domenico only seems to have done this sort of thing as a sideline. It was that vast collection of keyboard sonatas that he was famous for.
Whenever Radio 3 had a space to fill in the 1970's, they would give us a couple of D. Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas, complete with their Kirkpatrick catalogue number. But, in his spare time, he was laying down a small legacy of choral music fit to kick the latest generation off stage. We can either worry about that or, more likely, just prefer to listen to C18th music.
