Francis Poulenc: Stabat mater, Gloria & Litanies à la Vierge noire

Marking 50 years since the death of French composer Francis Poulenc, star soprano Patricia Petibon is the soloist in new recordings of his most rapturously beautiful sacred works; “Gloria” and “Stabat Mater”. Conductor Paavo Järvi also makes his DG recording debut, conducting the Orchestre de Paris and their renowned choir.

This major new release for Poulenc year brings together music of breathtaking beauty and originality, as well as Poulenc’s profoundly human spirituality. The album also features Poulenc’s passionate ‘Litanies à la Vierge noire’ (‘Litanies to the black Madonna’), written in response to the tragic death of a fellow composer – a work new to the DG catalogue and performed in the composer’s lesser-known arrangement with orchestral accompaniment. The album is released ahead of the December premiere of a high-profile new production of Poulenc’s famous sacred opera Dialogues des Carmélites at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, in which Patricia Petibon will debut the leading role of Blanche de La Force – an event which will focus the musical world on the memory of a French composer with a truly individual voice.

Petibon brings an extra-terrestrial weightlessness to the ‘Domine Deus’…and Järvi astutely manipulates Poulenc’s distinctive instrumental timbres while sensitivitely cosseting his equally characteristic purple harmonies…a well-planned cross-section of Poulenc’s religious music, admirably performed. — Gramophone Magazine, December 2013