Palestrina, Prince of Music

Celebrating the composer at 500

Saturday 15 February 2025, 7.30pm

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Holy Sepulchre London, 
Holborn Viaduct,
London EC1A 2DQ

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Conducted by David Allinson​

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Palestrina’s sacred music blazes with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, the movement beginning in the second half of the 16th century by which the Catholic Church sought to recover and reinvent itself in response to rebellion, Protestant doctrinal challenge, and territorial losses across swathes of Europe.

Working in the great churches and chapels of Rome, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was Italy’s most famous and prolific native-born composer of the High Renaissance period. During his career serving the centres of Catholic power, he provided music for every ceremony and feast, from intimate, expressive settings to majestic, audacious and even bombastic works. Such was the quality of his invention that his music has never fallen out of repertoire over succeeding centuries.
 
While consciously exploiting and consolidating styles and techniques inherited from continental composers all the way back to Josquin, Palestrina was also an innovator, especially in his polychoral music and in his word-setting, which can be vivid but never descends into superficiality. Yet history has too often pigeonholed him as a conservative, as the man who ‘saved’ church music in response to the edicts of the Council of Trent, or deployed as the tool of dreary pedagogues whose pupils were forced to write codified imitations of his counterpoint.
 
Our programme celebrates the 500th anniversary of Palestrina’s birth with a concert designed to showcase the quality, range and immediacy of his music. Our selection includes some of his finest compositions, from the emotive Stabat Mater and the intense Lamentations for Good Friday to the sunny Surrexit pastor bonus for Easter Day, with a rush of thrilling Pentecost pieces along the way.