Sacred Music from Renaissance Rome
Church of St Cross, Winchester. SO23 9SD
7.30pm
£15 in advance, or £17.50 on the door
http://www.ticketsource.co.uk/wessex-concerts
To celebrate 500 years since the birth of Palestrina, Cambridge Renaissance Voices presents a glorious programme of music from 16th-century Rome. Written for the Papal chapel at St Peter's, Palestrina's music earned him great fame and many imitators, for the sheer beauty of its flowing and harmonious contrapuntal style. While he and his successor, Felice Anerio, were native to Rome and spent their entire careers there, the tradition of sacred music in in the Papal City was by no means exclusively Italian. In the 15th century, the Borgia Popes reflected their Spanish origins by employing musicians from Spain in the Papal chapel. This tradition continued under Pope Paul III, who employed Cristobal de Morales in the choir of the Sistine Chapel from 1535. A decade after Morales's death, Spain's most celebrated Renaissance composer, Tomas Luis de Victoria, arrived in Rome. He spent over 20 years working at the Jesuit German College and the Pontifical Roman Seminary, where he succeeded Palestrina. While Victoria's music undoubtedly shows Palestrina's influence, it combines the fluent serenity of his polyphony with a new level of spiritual and emotional intensity, employing dramatic dissonances to profoundly moving effect.
CAMBRIDGE RENAISSANCE VOICES (Director, Rupert Preston Bell) was formed 12 years ago from a group of singers with a deep experience of sacred polyphony. Many of the singers met in the Cambridge Taverner Choir, with whom they recorded CDs of Portuguese Renaissance music (shortlisted for the Gramophone Early Music Award), performing these works in monasteries and churches in Coimbra and Lisbon. In addition to many appearances in St Cross, they have performed in the great Suffolk wool churches in Long Melford and Lavenham, in King's Lynn Minster, the Italianate church at Wilton, Sherborne Abbey and Boxgrove Priory.