Antonio Vivaldi's career as a sacred music composer did not start in Venice but in Brescia in 1712 when he received a commission from the Confederazione dell'oratorio di San Filippo Neri to compose the famous «Stabat mater.» It is performed in the midst of a program of works by the «Red Priest» and others, including Antonio Caldara, with whom he shared the decisive stages of his life, his birthplace and the place of his death.

The motet portrays sublime emotions of love, pain, and piety, supported by an intense orchestration that varies between slow and moderate tempos, and traverses a dark world ranging from F to C minor. It moved audiences of the past to tears, evoking the tears that the Mother of God shed on Golgotha in the sequence for the feast of «Septem Dolorum Beatae Mariae Virginis.»

In our program, Rinaldo Alessandrini's Concerto Italiano musicians will perform the motet «Longe mala umbrae terrores,» a spectacular work that brought the dramatic language of opera into the liturgy, together with Norwegian mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland. This piece was likely composed by Vivaldi for a castrato for the feast of St. Lawrence, and it shows how the sacred and profane realms had come closer together in Italian-language vocal music of the 1720s and 30s, in a truly astonishing way.