There are few voices in early music that command both the intimacy of prayer and the theatrical precision of architecture. Andreas Scholl’s is one of them — a countertenor tone that seems to hover between the sensual and the sacred, a sound made of light as much as breath. On October 28 at the Jansug Kakhidze Music Center, the opening of the Tbilisi Baroque Festival 2025 was built around that sound, as if the entire evening had been tuned to its frequency.
Georgia’s principal early-music event, now in its tenth year, has grown into a cultural phenomenon — part musicological laboratory, part act of identity. Its opening program, titled “Georgian and European Old Music,” was a study in cultural simultaneity. It paired Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi with Georgian folk polyphony performed by the ensemble Shavnabada. The structure was deceptively simple: tradition followed by canon. Yet the evening unfolded more like a philosophical experiment — a test of what happens when two sonic civilizations — oral and written, eastern and western, ritual and rational — meet inside a single acoustic space.
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (1736), written by a dying twenty-six-year-old, is among the most paradoxical works in the baroque repertoire. It sets the medieval Latin text about Mary at the Cross — a text of tears, silence, and suspended time — to music of unbearable tenderness. Scholl has sung this piece countless times with ensembles from the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin to Il Giardino Armonico, yet in Tbilisi, under the baton of German conductor Cornelia von Kerssenbrock, the work gained a different resonance.
From the opening duet with the Italian soprano Giulia Bolcato, Scholl’s countertenor did not so much enter the hall as permeate it. The Kakhidze Center’s modernist acoustics — a blend of concrete and air — caught his voice and suspended it, turning the initial “Stabat Mater dolorosa” into a shimmer of overtones that felt almost liturgical.
Scholl’s phrasing was austere, stripped of sentimental ornament, his vowels sculpted into spatial forms. Each interval sounded like a moral decision. Where Bolcato projected clarity and brilliance, Scholl brought interiority — his pianissimi thinning to transparency, his vibrato barely perceptible, his melismas tapering like thought fading into contemplation. The dialogue between the two voices — male and female timbres inhabiting a single lament — became the evening’s metaphysical axis.
Von Kerssenbrock, a conductor with an instinct for theater, framed the soloists with the Georgian Sinfonietta, whose period-instrument ensemble played with remarkable cohesion and restraint. Strings breathed with Scholl’s lines; the basso continuo, discreet and flexible, gave the music an architectural gravity. The Tbilisi Women’s Choir, led by Omar Burduli, entered in the later movements with an angelic lightness, creating a sonic topology that felt both European and distinctly Georgian.
In Scholl’s artistry, the countertenor voice becomes more than a timbral curiosity. It is a philosophical statement — a re-gendering of sacred music, an act of historical recovery, a sound that destabilizes expectations of both masculinity and piety. His career — from Bach’s St. John Passion with Philippe Herreweghe to Handel’s Ombra mai fu that defined an entire era of baroque performance — has re-shaped the instrument’s cultural identity.
In Tbilisi, that history met another kind of antiquity. Georgia’s vocal tradition, embodied earlier in the evening by Shavnabada, predates Pergolesi by centuries. Its polyphony — dense, dissonant, modal — is a living archaeology of human harmony. When Shavnabada sang from both eastern and western Georgian schools, the audience heard intervals that hover between tones of lament and triumph, cadences that refuse closure, harmonies that swell like geological strata.
Placed before the Stabat Mater, this folk polyphony acted as a kind of prelude in raw material — a reminder of the pre-Baroque world in which sound still carried cosmological weight. And when Scholl began to sing, it was as if Pergolesi’s linear sorrow had grown out of that earth. His countertenor became the bridge: ancient timbre meeting European form, folk metaphysics refined through Western grammar.
For Tbilisi, a city perpetually negotiating its position between East and West, the evening’s structure felt allegorical. The Tbilisi Baroque Festival, founded by the Georgian Sinfonietta in 2015, has always been about more than stylistic authenticity. It is about sovereignty of sound — the right to participate in the global early-music discourse not as a periphery but as a center. To open this year’s edition with both Georgian folk and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater was to claim that the “old music” of Georgia and of Europe are parallel continuities, not hierarchical opposites.
Scholl’s presence lent that claim gravitas. When an artist who has sung at Glyndebourne, Covent Garden, and Carnegie Hall stands on a Tbilisi stage, the local and global meet on equal terms. His performance re-defined the hall’s air: the sound of Western sacred grief translated into the acoustics of the Caucasus.
Festival openings are usually ceremonial; this one felt initiatory. Its architecture — folk followed by Pergolesi — re-enacted the civilizational movement from communal chant to individual expression. Yet in Tbilisi the movement reversed itself. By ending with the Stabat Mater, performed by a choir of Georgian women and an international countertenor, the evening turned lament into collective renewal.
In the end, what the Tbilisi Baroque Festival inaugurated this year was not merely a season of concerts, but an epistemology: a way of listening to heritage as dialogue. Through Shavnabada’s polyphonic earth and Scholl’s crystalline heaven, the festival’s opening night drew an invisible line between the village and the chapel, the collective and the individual, the body and the breath.
Review by Ivan Nechaev
