Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: Stabat Mater & Antonio Vivaldi: Gloria

The album contains two sacred works of the Italian Baroque of the Neapolitan and Venetian schools – the Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and the Gloria RV 589 by Antonio Vivaldi. Elena Obraztsova became interested in Baroque music (especially Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater) when she was a student, but did not sing the work until the early 1980s. On December 26, 1981, she sang it in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory together with Natalia Gerasimova, the Moscow Chamber Choir, and the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra conducted by Saulius Sondeckis. On September 6, 1982, they performed in the Vilnius Great Philharmonic Hall in Vilnius with Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. Performances with the same cast followed in Leningrad as well. In 1983, the works were then recorded by the All-Union Recording Studio Melodiya. “I thank fate for the good fortune of making music with you,” Saulius Sondeckis wrote to Elena Obraztsova. “We remember these encounters so precious to me and to the entire Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra.”