After having been out of fashion for some time, the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina is once again attracting Renaissance performers. This one features the 15-voice Brabant Ensemble from Britain, a superb small choir from whose output you can confidently pick anything and not go wrong. Here, the ensemble and its director, Stephen Rice, take on an early work by Palestrina, the Missa ad coenam Agni. This mass appeared in 1554, years before the probably apocryphal incident in which he is said to have "saved" polyphony ...
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After having been out of fashion for some time, the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina is once again attracting Renaissance performers. This one features the 15-voice Brabant Ensemble from Britain, a superb small choir from whose output you can confidently pick anything and not go wrong. Here, the ensemble and its director, Stephen Rice, take on an early work by Palestrina, the Missa ad coenam Agni. This mass appeared in 1554, years before the probably apocryphal incident in which he is said to have "saved" polyphony by convincing the new Counter Reformation Catholic regime that it could be done without recourse to sensualist techniques of text expression. The work hasn't been recorded much, and it's fascinating. It is very much a product of its composer, despite its early date, with vast musical spaces built atop the piece of plainchant that serves as its cantus firmus. But into those spaces are built bits of complex contrapuntal artifice. The work has more of what you might call oomph (a...
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