Review: Cambridge Early Music: Stile Antico: The Prince of Music: Palestrina in the Eternal City

On Thursday evening (6 March) at Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge Early Music welcomed the acclaimed Stile Antico with a performance celebrating the five hundredth birthday of Palestrina, master of the co-called antique style, and celebrating, too, their own twentieth anniversary as a professional ensemble named after him.

The evening was programmed in distinct sections, tracing the life of the composer from his distinguished role in Papal service, through his years of tragic personal experiences, and concluding with an assessment of the enormous legacy he left to the world of music.

Unlike Monteverdi and JS Bach, whose flames were re-kindled in later centuries, Palestrina has been a constant light studied by many of the greatest names which followed his.

Music in his time developed into an inspirational means of religious devotion leading to his compositions for confraternities such as those of St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, one of the intellectual arms of the Roman Catholic Church and a spearhead of the Counter-Reformation.

In fact the opening sentence of Loyola’s First Principle and Foundation is worth keeping in mind for a secularised age as the baseline from which everything in the ecclesiastical function of the Church, including its music, operated.

“Man was created to praise, reverence and serve God Our Lord, and by so doing to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth were created for man’s sake and to help him in carrying out the end for which he was created.”

Stile Antico’s delivery of Palestrina’s Tu es Petrus (“Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church”) reminded one of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins enumerating those persuasions that led to his own conversion.

He writes: “Texts like ‘Thou art Peter (the evasions proposed for this alone are enough to make one a Catholic)’”, and he lists, “an increasing knowledge of the Catholic system […] which only wants to be known in order to be loved – its consolations, its marvellous ideal of holiness, the faith and devotion of its children, its multiplicity, its array of saints and martyrs, its consistency and unity, its glowing prayers, the daring majesty of its claims…”

It was just such conviction containing the likes of the above that provided the raison d’être for the great Church music of Palestrina and that of other contemporaries, and which must be primarily taken into consideration in any estimation of it.

Just as the non-literate could look on church wall paintings during services to ‘see’ how holiness might be imagined or, conversely in more threatening examples, what terrors could be in store for them if they failed in their duties and devotions, the polyphonic flow and gentle melodic arches of Palestrina’s masses, motets and hymns were intended to create an aural approximation to the very ‘sound’ of heaven itself.

And no other interpreters of Palestrina’s works could exceed the sense of conviction and high seriousness that Stile Antico brought to their interpretation of these pieces, with their purpose of demonstrating both the music’s unparalleled musical richness and the extent of its emotional expressiveness.

Thursday’s programme was the ensemble’s splendid deployment under separate headings of such works, including those, too, by predecessors like Josquin de Prez and contemporaries, Tomás Luis de Victoria and Jacques Arcadelt.

Palestrina, with the exception of a few years in youth as an organist in his native city, spent his entire career in the service of the Papacy and in the greatest chapels and churches of Rome.

The music and its doctrinal significance are interchangeable and present in everything we heard.

This is not to say that Palestrina’s was a ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue’ within the enclaves of Catholicism. Under the heading ‘A Time of Turmoil’ Stile Antico revealed in his dark motet ‘Peccantem me quotidie’ (“I, a daily impenitent sinner, am troubled by the fear of death”) that the composer was no stranger to the wounds and hardships of life’s sorrows.

In the space of ten years death claimed his brother, two sons and then his wife. Yet in the motet which followed, Gioia M’abond’al cor tanta e sì pura (‘My heart overflows with such pure joy’), Palestrina could express a new-found happiness in the company of his second wife and a confident resurgent hope in the promise of Christ’s Resurrection.

The concert’s final section In Praise of Music rehearsed the deep-seated meaning of music to Palestrina.

Writing to Philip of Austria, the composer invites the patronage of the King describing music as “a gift of heaven greater than all human teaching” and sees it as his “task to bend all my knowledge and industry to that which is the most divine of all things”.

In conclusion, we heard a new work by multi-award-winning contemporary composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad which had been commissioned for this concert by Stile Antico.

Titled A Gift of Heaven, it is a setting of Palestrina’s own words (above) from the Preface to the volume in which one of the greatest Masses, his Missa Papae Marcelli (traditionally sung at Papal coronations), had been published.

The composer was in the audience and was duly applauded for the original form her deference to Palestrina had adopted and the obvious belief she shared with him in music’s timeless and profound significance.

Trinity Chapel was the setting for this beautiful concert, adjacent to the College of St John where the young student William Wordsworth remembered nearby “Trinity’s loquacious clock,/ Who never let the quarters, night or day,/ Slip by him unproclaimed, and told the hours/ Twice over with a male and female voice”.

This clock is still there and, amusingly, two or three times brought a pause in proceedings by contradicting the key in which the ensemble was about to begin.

The performance in its closing segment performed Allegri’s Christus Resurgens, as one of the company remarked “a little early for Easter.”

But how better could the audience have acknowledged the first day of Lent by celebrating the devotional work of the ‘Prince of Music’ while marvelling at the superlative Stile Antico and the glorious sound they make in delivering it.