Although the paragraph on the rear of the disc proclaims Caldara’s Stabat mater to be ‘a major score of the period [which …] stands comparison with J S Bach’, I was left wondering, after this performance, whether it was the same piece. Caldara has long been brewing up for a major revival. He was, after all, a deputy Kapellmeister in Charles V’s opulent Viennese court, and his output is both prolific and intermittently distinguished.
Yet this programme of Lenten and Holy Week music is rarely spine- tingling beyond statutory suspensions and chromatic descents, and is certainly not in the Scarlatti or Pergolesi league of late-baroque musical ‘smells and bells’. The issue is compounded by some erratic pitching from the soloists, and the string playing hardly gets off to an auspicious start in the Sinfonia in G minor. There are flashes of darkly resonant doublings of voices and instruments with several impressive homophonic progressions, which the unabashed Mozart willingly absorbed into his church ‘language’. More sustained beauty and individuality can be found in the Missa dolorosa, from 1735, where Caldara exhibits his contrapuntal instincts with worthy formulae and, in the ‘Benedictus’, a touching melodic stillness. Some of the closed, ritornello sections reveal an accomplished craftsman, but when all is said and done, the invention is hardly inspired. Go carefully.'