Customer Reviews

Palestrina: Music for Holy Saturday

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This is a beautifully-sung and -recorded disc representing a reconstruction of the Holy Saturday service in which Palestrina's music is interspersed among the Gregorian chants used for that day in the calendar. The whole makes for an interesting contrast between the monody of the chant and the polyphony Palestrina wrote--which helps to refresh the ears as to how radical a departure polyphonic writing must have sounded like--and the performances are excellent throughout. Strongly recommended.

This is the first CD I have heard in this well-received series of three discs of Palestrina's Music for Holy Week, and if the quality of this one is anything to go by then I certainly won't be hesitating for long before seeking out the others. The 12-voice ensemble Musica Contexta, directed by Simon Ravens, have a natural, unforced style in this music, as if they had just walked in off the streets of 16th-century Rome and didn't need any of those time-consuming rehearsals because they all know exactly what to do and how to do it. I expect this is not really the case - not the 16th-century bit, at least - but it's very much the impression they give, and the result is that they sound stylish, confident, beautifully balanced and altogether lovely.

All these qualities make the group eminently suited to the performance of Palestrina's music, and they are wonderfully responsive to this composer's indivisible combination of immaculate surface beauty and profound contemplation that is so well exemplified in the choice of music in this programme. This consists of three Lamentations of Jeremiah from Book III, the well-known Stabat mater and motet Sicut cervus, and a lesser-known but equally beautiful Benedictus for Holy Week, with some passages of chant interspersed. The group deliver superbly the searing chromaticism of the Lamentations, and are especially impressive in the powerful build-up of emotion towards the close of the third Lamentation. They are equally at home in the peaceful stillness of Palestrina's contemplative passages; their rendering of the beautiful Benedictus, a work which I hadn't come across before, is quite splendid, as is the much more frequently performed Sicut cervus which ends the programme.

Altogether this is a profoundly moving CD, offering a beautifully balanced programme of music performed as near to perfection as I can imagine - in fact, it's one of the finest Palestrina discs I have heard, and that's saying a lot. Finally, if you like Musica Contexta's approach, and if you fancy more Roman renaissance music but this time with a Franco-Flemish flavour, you may also enjoy their stunning disc of Jacques Arcadelt's parody mass on Andreas de Silva's motet "Ave, Regina caelorum" ( Candlemass in Renaissance Rome ); to all lovers of renaissance sacred music, I can almost guarantee you won't regret it!