Today Domenico Scarlatti’s reputation rests largely on his enormous output of keyboard music (over five hundred esercizi, or sonatas). His operas are entirely forgotten, and of his sacred music only the Stabat mater (track 1), unique in its grandeur and depth of expression, is at all well remembered. It was probably composed between 1713 and 1719, while Scarlatti was maestro di cappella at the Basilica Giulia in Rome, and, in common with the many Italian and Italianate works of this period which set such emotive texts (Pergolesi’s Stabat mater, Lotti’s eight-part Crucifixus, and Hasse’s Miserere are other famous examples), its use of rich textures and unexpected harmonies within the seemingly austere framework of ten voices and continuo produces effects comparable to a painter’s chiaroscuro. To this end, Scarlatti combines sinuous chromatic melodies in a contrapuntal texture, as in the opening ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’, and achieves strong emotional contrasts by, for example, juxtaposing the striding scales of the choral section ‘Quis est homo, qui non fleret’ and the tortured suspensions of the soloists’ ‘Quis non posset contristari’. The diatonic counterpoint of ‘Fac me vere tecum flere’ seems to hark back to the prima prattica style inherited from Palestrina, while the florid duet ‘Inflammatus et accensus’ and the dance-like final ‘Amen’ betray truly operatic mannerisms.