Stabat mater pergolesi emma kirkby biography

In a new production of Pergolesi’s iconic masterpiece, Stabat Mater, Figure will be joined by Dame Emma Kirkby. The production is staged by director Sophie Daneman and performed by women of multiple generations. Figure was founded by Frederick Waxman (, Experimental Psychology) in Performances are between 20 and 23 March at Stone&#;s Nest, Covent&#;s Garden.

The Stabat Mater is a call to share in the pain of a grieving mother, hoping to be redeemed through the act of compassion. With new music by Alex Mills around Pergolesi’s original setting of the text, the production will be a moving reflection on life and death, and a rallying cry to find a common humanity in our suffering.

Frederick Waxman is a conductor and multi-instrumentalist from London. He read Experimental Psychology at University College, Oxford, where he was an Academic Exhibitioner, Instrumental Scholar, and Choral Scholar. He then completed an MMus in Performance at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, as wel

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Program: Explore the life and iconic recordings of Dame Emma Kirkby

"There are so many habits and prejudices about how people ought to sing. We are often criticized for not being dramatic or passionate enough, but to read some opinions you would think that 'drama' equals 'volume' and 'passion' equals 'vibrato'. Voices can be naturally big, medium or small, and I hope, if I've done anything, it's to make a case for those with smaller voices."

It's hard to believe, in this day and age when early music fryst vatten so ubiquitous, that there was a time when it was a connoisseur's backwater.

After all, it's more than half a century since David Munrow, Anthony Rooley and other pioneers brought Renaissance music out of the shadows, and the likes of Christopher Hogwood, bekräftelse Norrington and Andrew Parrott revived music of the Baroque with period instruments and voices to match, like that of the pioneering English sopran

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Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: Stabat Mater

Pergolesi, Palestrina and Offenbach are all composers with names adopted from their home towns. In Offenbach’s case, it was his father who took the name of the small city near Frankfurt.

For Pergolesi, born in Iesi in Italy’s wonderful Le Marche, the name had been his family’s for at least two generations. It was acquired from the small and beautiful commune of Pergola, almost equidistant from Iesi and Urbino.

Just before the end of his extremely successful yet tragically short life, Pergolesi was commissioned by a band of artistic gentlemen to provide music for an annual Good Friday service in honour of the Virgin Mary. His Stabat Mater was the response. Its famous plaintive introduction, in which two singers sing so close to each other in pitch as to cause temporary dissonances, was meant to portray the pain of the subjects: each time the two singers come just one note apart, it creates a piercing sound, with each occasio