J.S. Bach’s Stabat Mater

OSL’s annual Bach Festival opens with a program crafted and conducted by Vox Luminis founder and artistic director Lionel Meunier, pairing J.S. Bach’s Psalm 51, Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden (Cancel, Highest, my sins) with sacred motet and psalm settings for soprano and countertenor by Vivaldi. Bach composed Psalm 51 as an arrangement of Pergolesi’s popular Stabat Mater, substituting German text for Latin and expanding the instrumentation. His purpose for “Bach’s Stabat Mater,” whether as a musical exercise or for use in a liturgical setting, isn’t clear, and the piece remained little known until its rediscovery by scholars in the late 1940s.  

It is known that Bach enjoyed exploring various musical genres and was aware of works by contemporaries such as Pergolesi and Vivaldi. While he likely never met the latter, Bach transcribed a number of Vivaldi’s concertos, providing a link between the Baroque masters on this program. Soprano Gemma Nha performs Vivaldi’s Nulla in mundo pax sincera, a sacred motet set to an anonymous Latin text. The title translates as “In this world there is no honest peace,” and the three-part text focuses on a world without bitterness, through trust in the Lord. In Nisi Dominus, Vivaldi sets the Vesper Psalm for solo voice. Written during the composer’s time at the Venice orphanage La Pieta, it was originally scored for mezzo-soprano, although it is commonly performed today by countertenors like Reginald Mobley, known for his “shimmering voice” (BachTrack) and “Crystalline diction and pure, evenly produced tone” (Miami Herald).