La Stagione Armonica & Sergio Balestracci - Alessandro Scarlatti: Responsories for Holy Week - Holy Saturday (2018) [CD Rip]

It is not certain that all the music on this disc is by Scarlatti; the manuscript that contains the nine Tenebrae Responsories for Holy Saturday and four Lenten motets is unsigned and in places incomplete. Conductor Sergio Balestracci is confident of their authorship, however, on stylistic grounds and because Scarlatti is reported to have composed settings of these Passiontide meditations in ‘the solid style of Palestrina’ for the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1708.

Not that anyone could actually mistake this music for Palestrina’s. The stile antico may have been considered the appropriate manner for church music in Italy at this time but it was still up to a point an evolving style, and Scarlatti’s little motets have their Baroque moments – a chromatic twist of the knife here, a dramatic word-isolation there. Anyone expecting anything remotely like the dynamic sacred music Handel was writing in Italy at this time – most notably Dixit Dominus – will be disappointed; but while this is essentially a rather austere listen, it is not a severe one. In fact the music is insistently beautiful, and if as a sequence the whole thing can seem a little featureless, it perhaps makes its impact best as a sustained background atmosphere of sorrowful contemplation.

The 16-strong La Stagione Armonica are not, it must be said, as smooth as many of the comparable mixed choirs in the field today, nor even as in tune, but the sound they make is appealing in its firm-throated expressiveness and in the way Balestracci’s interpretative detailing somehow creates an air of simple yet fervent piety, as if this really were all about the sufferings of Christ – ‘unsupported, alone and betrayed’ as Scarlatti put it – and not about putting on a ‘performance’.

The vocal sequence is punctuated by some muscly organ pieces played with aplomb by Carlo Rossi on the instrument of St Catherine’s in Padua, and rather splendid they sound too. -- Lindsay Kemp, Gramophone