Search - Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Gregorian Chant :: Palestrina: Music for Good Friday

Palestrina's part-writing was, and is, famous for being clear, elegant, and orderly enough to be used as a textbook in counterpoint. In his own day and in ours, however, the composer has been criticized for achieving technical perfection at the expense of expressiveness and emotional power. So the first half of this disc may come as a pleasant shock. Palestrina's settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah have the mystical melancholy usually associated with his Spanish colleague Victoria. Simon Ravens and his singers don't re-create an entire Good Friday service from 16th-century Rome for this recording (that would run several hours), but they do give us three Lamentations settings, each followed by its plainchant response (sung with just the right air of somber contemplation), as well as Palestrina's simple, unadorned settings of hymns and "reproaches" from the day's liturgy. Musica Contexta perform those hymns with a devotion that makes the admiration of Palestrina's contemporaries for those settings (despite their plainness) seem more than plausible. --Matthew Westphal