Julia Lezhneva, Maarten Engeltjes & PRJCT Amsterdam, Pergolesi's Stabat mater: passion

Sometimes two voices say more than a hundred-piece orchestra. In In Pergolesi’s Stabat mater, soprano Julia Lezhneva and countertenor Maarten Engeltjes meet in the most poignant pages of music literature. Their contrasting but perfectly complementary timbres – Lezhneva’s radiant clarity and Engeltjes’ warm intensity – dig into the deeper layers of meaning of this universal story of loss, comfort, and hope. Met Engeltjes’s baroque orchestra PRJCT Amsterdam gives this music the direct and refined expressiveness it deserves. The icing on the cake is Vivaldi’s explosive motet In furore iustissimae irae and the equally iconic Cum dederit from Nisi Dominus: an ebb and flow of ecstatic virtuosity and contemplative beauty.