The Golden Renaissance: Palestrina

Martin Luther’s protest against the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church had barely taken root by the time Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born in 1525. Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli (Mass for Pope Marcellus), composed around 35 years later, became the model of how a reformed sacred music should sound: pure, untroubled by harsh dissonances, and, above all, clear in its delivery of revered liturgical texts. Stile Antico shows why so many regarded this Mass as the saviour of church music. Performing in the round, sans conductor, the singers seem to become the music, each voice ideally balanced and blended. There is heft when it’s needed and jaw-dropping subtlety, too, the latter exquisitely channelled in the “Qui tollis” of the “Gloria”, the former unleashed in the ecstatic closing moments of Tu es Petrus.