Catholicism's sublimation of suffering is responsible for some of the church's most enduring artistic treasures, such as the Stabat Mater, the medieval poem that turns compassion for Mary's anguish into a desire to suffer in Christ's place. Setting the poem to music has been part of Eastertide liturgical practice for centuries, but few versions are more excruciatingly delightful than Pergolesi's 1736 setting.

Not many performing collaborations could capture this spirit better than the Italian soprano Roberta Invernizzi and contralto Sonia Prina with the English Concert.

The orchestra have a characteristic way of dancing on every note, and a freedom of movement (exploited here to great effect by Bernard Labadie's conducting) that allowed them to pause mid-gesture, opening up a fleeting space in which to savour Pergolesi's stabbing dissonances, whose blades were given a fresh edge by flawless period intonation.

Sonia Prina has a slightly more theatrical manner than Invernizzi, and a way of giving everything to the emotional dimension of the music while retaining, through her total technical mastery, a sense that she's eating it all for breakfast. This is enhanced by her appearance, with its mixture of couture chic and punk-revival hair. But both singers, together in the Pergolesi and separately in Pergolesi's Salve Regina and Vivaldi's Stabat Mater, which made up most of the concert's first half, were extraordinary in the way they spiced up the surface with endless variation of ornamental style, and in their ability to switch vibrato and other expressive devices on or off, to change the colour and thickness of the voice – all in the blinking, or perhaps the winking, of an eye.

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