BBCSO/Minkowski

Marc Minkowski's Pergolesi tercentenary concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra placed the Stabat Mater, his best-known work, alongside Pulcinella, Stravinsky's remarkable 1920 ballet, which impudently reworks music by Pergolesi. This was a great occasion. Minkowski is as much at home with 18th-century authenticity as with the abrasions and edges of early modernism. The BBCSO were keenly responsive, and the results attained an undemonstrative perfection. A key work in the creation of inter-war neoclassicism, Pulcinella is the equivalent of an old master refashioned by a cubist. The shapes remain intact, but the colours, lines and perspectives are radically altered. The score inhabits the 18th and 20th centuries at once, and the conductor has to mediate between the two. In contrast to the thickish string tone favoured by many interpreters, Minkowski brought elements of period fastidiousness to bear on the proceedings without losing sight of the ironies of Stravinsky's orchestration. The witty, sexy soloists, meanwhile, seemed poised between art deco and baroque: tenor Julien Behr flirted exquisitely with soprano Marita Solberg, while bass Matthew Rose looked cynically on. The Stabat Mater inhabited a world of devotional introspection, so immaculately sustained that a hush fell on the audience. Solberg was joined by contralto Nathalie Stutzmann, their voices blending rapturously, yet taking us into different territory in the solos. Solberg, with her radiant tone, sounded fixated on heaven, while Stutzmann, sepulchral and androgynous, seemed to cleave sorrowing to the earth. Beautiful, at times intolerably moving, and rarely bettered.