Stabat Mater

On 21 March 2026, the Quarteto Euterpe performed Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater at the Igreja Matriz Antiga in Vila Nova de Famalicão, as part of the city’s Holy Week celebrations. Soprano Raquel Mendes and mezzo-soprano Maria Bustorff joined the quartet for an evening that brought together the solemnity of a sacred space with the intimacy of chamber music.

The work, composed by Pergolesi in 1736 in the final weeks of his life, was originally written for soprano, contralto, strings and continuo — a scoring that, in the eighteenth century, belonged to the world of private devotion rather than grand liturgy. Presenting it with string quartet alone, without continuo, proved a genuine artistic challenge: the ensemble had to rethink the sonic balance and the distribution of inner voices within a formation that, unusual for the period, places heightened responsibility on each instrumental line. The result was a dense and intimate reading, in which the austerity of the strings deepened the expressive weight of every movement.

The setting of the Igreja Matriz Antiga, with its acoustics and historical significance, proved an ideal space for a work born precisely from the tension between the human and the sacred.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​