NO ONE is quite sure when the Italian Renaissance composer Palestrina was born; and this has proved a perfect excuse for anniversary celebrations two years running.
The major work in the Tallis Scholars’ programme of music inspired by Rome’s Sistine Chapel, performed at the Cadogan Hall in London on 13 May, was the UK première of a Requiem Mass from an unfinished 1588 manuscript, completed by Riccardo Pintus. Unusually, this begins with a plainchant, not polyphonic, introit. Plainchant, sung with elegant simplicity by male voices, alternates with sections of the composer’s trademark florid polyphony throughout.
They began with the Pentecost motet Dum complerentur, which displayed all Talllis’s benign characteristics: a bright soprano line over an undulating sea of velvety lower voices, perfect intonation, and a remarkable evenness of tone throughout the registers. Most important, every line in the sometimes very complex counterpoint was clear, and the closing alleluias were full of joy.
Two settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah were pleasantly contrasted. The little-known Fleming Dominique Phinot (died 1556) was an early pioneer of the polychoral style. Here, two choirs exchange, alternate, and echo material, and sections for upper and then lower voices play with texture before the choirs recombine in a full-throated Patres nostri peccaverunt (Our fathers have sinned).
Matthew Martin (born 1976), set passages from the Lamentations as a commission from the Tallis Scholars in 2015. It is a most attractive work, combining florid counterpoint with modern harmonies, like Palestrina in a different colour.
Palestrina’s Epiphany motet Surge, iluminare had a shining warmth, the energy of the polyphonic lines as notable as the impeccable diction, as two choirs celebrated the gifts of the Three Kings in triple time and skipped through the word painting at “a multitude of camels”.
Naturally there was an encore. A ten-part Regina Caeli by the Flemish Nicholas Gomberts (died c.1560) showed us how much Palestrina owed to those who came before him.