Stabat Mater by Pergolesi – Bach Version: Tilge Höchster, meine Sünden

THE GREAT MASTER OF THE BAROQUE CANTATA

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater is one of the top milestones in sacred music of all times. It talks about Mary’s sorrow at the feet of the crucified Jesus, of devotion and unconditional love, and it is performed all over the world for Easter Week. The Italian composer wrote it in 1736, and several years later, the Baroque genius and to many the father of classical music, Johann Sebastian Bach, took the Italian composer’s score and orchestrally expanded it, making his own version of the Stabat Mater. The outcome was the cantata BWV 1083 Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden (Blot out, Highest, my sins). It is a musical parody that premiered in Leipzig and was probably composed towards the end of Bach’s career in around 1748, when he set Psalm 51 to music. The edition that the Festival Peralada is dedicating to Easter is reviving the German genius’s virtually unknown and seldom performed arrangement of Pergolesi’s earlier work. Under the musical direction of Daniel Tarrida, founder of the project BZM and director of the Festival Bachcelona and the Edinbach Festival in Edinburgh, the work will be performed by the Salvat Bach Grant soloists, Lara Morger and Maëlys Robinne, and the Bachcelona Consort Instrumental Ensemble, which features outstanding musicians of different nationalities living in Barcelona. The programme also includes other religious cantatas by the Kantor of Leipzig, including BWV 4 Christ lag in Todesbanden (Christ lay in death’s bonds) and the cantata for Easter Sunday BWV 31 Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret (The heavens laugh! The earth shouts with joy). It will be an evening devoted to an utterly brilliant composer, the author of the most-performed works in history.