‘Akademie für alte Musik Berlin’

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's Stabat Mater has long been part of the canon of Western classical music, thanks to a considerable extent to the beauty with which it transposes the maternal suffering expressed in the text into music. There is also, of course, the added poignancy of a work completed by a composer suffering from tuberculosis, shortly before his own death. His Septem verba a Christo in cruce (Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross) has had a different fate. Long overlooked, it was not until 2012 that this work was brought back to life by René Jacobs at the head of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, who have since recorded it for Harmonia Mundi. In the opinion of the Ghent conductor, it is not so much "a tragedy or a Passion" as a "meditative, instructive oratorio".