Promoted without caveat as a genuine work of Pergolesi’s, this setting of the Seven Last
Words remains firmly rooted under the ‘Spurious’ heading in Grove Music Online. On necessarily limited
aural acquaintance and in the face of a number of pertinent questions not answered in the disc’s booklet, my own view
sides firmly with that of Grove. A large scale work consisting of seven cantatas, each including two arias and in
several cases also an accompagnato introduction, the piece is known only from sources north of the Alps, all of which
seem not only to date from around the 1760s, a period notorious for Pergolesi fakes, but also to have a degree of concordance
between them. Its attribution to Pergolesi seems to me to fly in the face of several important questions: firstly, there is
to the best of my knowledge no Neapolitan tradition of Seven Last Words settings, so what occasion was the work composed for?;
I’m surprised the curious inclusion of an obbligato harp part in the third cantata has not raised more eyebrows –
the harp had no place in orchestral writing in Italy at the supposed time of composition; the writing for horns in the soprano
aria at the end of the third cantata sounds to belong to a latter period. But for me the most telling evidence comes from
the music itself. Are we really to believe that the composer of this rather featureless, even at times clichéd work,
is the same as the young genius who wrote the Stabat Mater? It contains little, if any, of the melodic
distinction, harmonic interest or bittersweet chromaticism (surely just the kind of writing Pergolesi might surely have been
expected at least to foreshadow in a Seven Last Words setting?) of that masterpiece. Indeed, I would suggest the attribution
does disservice to Pergolesi.
What is not in doubt is the authenticity of the performance, since this is
without doubt a Jacobs c.2013, bearing as it does all the hallmarks of the idiosyncrasy characteristic of the conductor’s
work in recent years. Here that includes absurdly drawn out and mannered cadences, grotesque dynamic contrasts etc. etc. The
bass (Jesus) is grainy voiced and employs far too much vibrato; the remaining soloists are unexceptionable, while the orchestral
playing is of high quality.
