Julia Lezhneva, Maarten Engeltjes & PRJCT Amsterdam

'The most perfect and moving duet ever to have flowed from the pen of any composer.' This is how the philosopher Rousseau described the first movement of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. Pergolesi wrote it in 1736, suffering from tuberculosis, in the last weeks of his 26-year life in a Franciscan monastery near Pozzuoli.