Agony & Ecstasy

The Programme

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From celestial ecstasy to piercing agony.

Brisbane Lyric Opera opens its inaugural season with two of the baroque era's most arresting sacred works.

Vivaldi's motets — written for the Venetian Ospedale della Pietà — soar with virtuosic joy, while Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, composed on his deathbed at just twenty-six, remains one of the most moving settings of sacred text ever penned.

Performed in the cathedral-like acoustics of Albert Street Uniting Church, this is an evening that traverses the full emotional arc of the human experience.

Programme Notes

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About the works.

Vivaldi: Sum in medio tempestatum & Ascende laeta

Antonio Vivaldi composed his solo motets for the gifted young musicians of the Ospedale della Pietà — a Venetian orphanage that became, under his direction, one of the finest musical institutions in Baroque Europe. Written to showcase the virtuosity of his students, these works pair devotional texts with the full expressive palette of the era: blazing coloratura, tender lyricism, and the dramatic contrasts that made Vivaldi the most imitated composer of his age.

Sum in medio tempestatum ('I am in the midst of storms') opens with urgent turbulence before yielding to an aria of transcendent calm — a musical portrait of faith amid adversity. Ascende laeta ('Rise, joyful one') concludes the Vivaldi half with brilliant ascending figures, carrying the soprano voice to its most luminous heights.

Pergolesi: Stabat Mater

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi composed his Stabat Mater in 1736 during the final weeks of his life — he was twenty-six years old. Setting the medieval Latin text, a meditation on the grief of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross, Pergolesi produced a work of such emotional purity that it became the most frequently printed piece of music in the eighteenth century.

Scored for soprano, mezzo-soprano, strings, and continuo, the work unfolds across twenty brief movements, each a jewel of restrained expressivity. The opening bars — strings descending in suspended dissonance as the two voices enter, interlocked — established a musical language for grief that composers have returned to ever since.