Giovanni Battista Pergolesi Stabat mater Bärenreiter Urtext Edited by Robert Ross
BA 7679 Score EUR 27.95 Strings each EUR 4.95 Organ EUR 14.95 Piano reduction by Robert Ross BA 7679a EUR 9.95 To appear in March 2005	Pergolesi's »Stabat mater« in the Urtext The genesis of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s famous Stabat mater is largely shrouded in obscurity. Many legends have grown up around the work. One of the anecdotes states, that Pergolesi completed it as a »swan song« only two days before his early death, obviously an attempt to evoke parallels with Mozart’s Requiem. The autograph score, preserved in the monastery at Montecassino, clearly reveals however that the Stabat mater arose over a period of several years. Pergolesi’s work, with its relatively light scoring for solo alto and soprano and a small body of strings, dispenses entirely with sections of recitative and makes almost exclusive use of the two part »aria da chiesa«. Roughly half of its twelve numbers are duets which, like the solo arias, make no attempt to conceal the influence of contemporary opera. Robert Ross of the Pergolesi Research Institute, New York, has produced a scholarly-critical edition reflecting the current state of scholarship. With its notes on performance practice, this Urtext edition forms a solid and reliable basis for rehearsals and concert performance.