Pergolesi woes

Orchestral rehearsal for the Pergolesi Stabat mater last night. What a nightmare!

The instrumental parts (Kalmus) are horrible -- full of added (and inconsistent) dynamics, random bowings, unstylistic interpretive marks such as "espr." and "sotto voce" and "Andante amoroso". The parts were hard to read because I had crossed out so many of these markings in advance. Thank God I had players with good musical sense who could easily ignore the stupid stuff and make music with it.

The full score (Dover, based on an Alfred Einstein edition) isn't much better, although totally inconsistent with the parts. At least my continuo player was playing from the same full score, improvising from the figured bass -- I can imagine what the publisher's continuo realization might be like.

The vocal score (Hal Leonard) -- don't even get me started. More random interpretive marks, missing measures, some movements rebarred. I had to re-typeset one movement in Sibelius for the chorus because the changes necessary to make it useable were so extensive.

And none of them had measure numbers, rehearsal letters, or any other kind of navigation. This is a pretty regularly-performed piece. How do other people rehearse it? We got half as much accomplished in the orchestral rehearsal because we had to spend so much time working around the editions' flaws. Hasn't anybody published a decent edition of this? MUSICA's listing of editions isn't exactly inspiring: Peters, Ricordi, Hinshaw, Shawnee (some of these may be only the first movement, rather than the whole work). Hello? Music publishers? Potential income for someone who produces a decent edition! Or tons of potential gratitude to someone who makes a CPDL edition!

This title is a staple for children's choirs and an easy piece for women's choirs; it gets performed all the time. Great tunes; if Pergolesi hadn't died at age 26 he'd be a giant among composers. Does everyone have these same problems?