IN THE second of three programmes celebrating Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in the 500th year since his birth, and exploring his music for the eucharist, the Sixteen, directed as ever by Harry Christopher, focused on the Last Supper and the breaking of the bread.
The listener always knows what to expect with the group: the attention to detail, the careful blending, impeccable tuning, clarity of diction with gentler consonants than some other chamber choirs of similar calibre, thrillingly full-throated climaxes, and boyish purity from the sopranos. The slightly reverberant acoustic of St James’s, Spanish Place, with its high-vaulted ceiling, added an authentic luminous glow to music written for St Peter’s in Rome.
They started with the Corpus Christi motet Ego sum panis vivus, followed by the Kyrie from the Missa Fratres ego enim accepi, based on melodic fragments of an earlier Fratres ego motet setting a text commemorating the Last Supper. Later, we heard the work’s Gloria, full of the same mesmerising call-and-response echo effects.
The eight-part Stabat Mater was the papal choir’s jealously guarded exclusive property for two centuries, performed every Palm Sunday. Palestrina’s use of two choirs in an antiphonal style looks forward to later Venetian music. Bookending this were six poems from the Song of Songs, dedicated to Pope Gregory XIII. They have no formal liturgical purpose, but it was common for music to be written for the Pope’s private suppers; so this is very possibly sacred chamber music.
In the Pange lingua, with its text glorifying the eucharist, the composer alternates between plainchant and polyphony. As a chorister himself, he understood instinctively how long a phrase should be. Singers never need to snatch a breath, and can focus entirely on the meaning of texts, something else of which the Sixteen amply demonstrated their accustomed mastery.
