Sickly from birth, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was only 26 when he died of tuberculosis. But he was prodigiously productive in his short career and left behind at least two genuine masterpieces in wildly different modes: the groundbreaking comic opera La serva padrona and the achingly beautiful Stabat mater, which J.S. Bach admired so much that he recomposed the piece with a German psalm text as one of his great Leipzig cantatas.

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Contrasting 18th-century masterpieces led by Bernard Labadie, a Baroque and Classical specialist.