Luogo e data di registrazione		- Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, Hamburg-Harburg (Germania) - maggio 1974 (Lassus) - All Saint's Church, Petersham (Inghilterra) - agosto 1974 (Palestrina)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Andreas Holschneider (Lassus) - Gerd Ploebsch (Lassus) - Mark Brown (Palestrina) / Wolfgang Mitlehner (Lassus) - Tony Faulkner (Palestrina)
	Prima Edizione LP		- Archiv - 2533 322 - (1 lp) - durata 43' 43" - (p) 1976 - Analogico - (Palestrina - parziale) - Archiv - 2533 290 - (1 lp) - durata 54' 33" - (p) 1975 - Analogico - (Lassus - parziale)
	Edizione "Collectio" CD		Archiv - 437 072-2 - (1 cd) - durata 62' 16" - (c) 1986 - ADD
	Note		-

PALESTRINA · LASSUS: SACRED WORKS Palestrina was born about 1525, probably in the little town of the same name in the hills east of Rome, Lassus some seven years later in Mons, the capital of the county of Hainault, then part of the Emperor Charles V’s possessions in what is now Belgium. Both achieved international renown as early as the middle 1560s, and both died within a few months of one another in 1594 - Palestrina in Rome and Lassus in Munich, where he had served the ducal court of Bavaria for nearly 40 years. Both are, as it were, musical grand-children ofthe great Josquin Desprez, yet each exploits a different aspect of his multi-faceted art: Palestrina the plainsong-saturated lyrical counterpoint of his later works, Lassus his energetic rhythms, harmonic drive and vivid expressiveness. It is natural to see some of this difference in terms of the age-old contrast between northern and southern traditions, but some of it must surely come from differences of temperament, formed by two very different careers. Palestrina received his early training as a choirboy in Rome at the basilica of S. Maria Maggiore. A few years as organist in his home town then enabled him to refine his skills in a backwater, but also brought him the powerful patronage of the local bishop, who was elected pope as Julius III in 1550. Within a year Palestrina was back in Rome, first as choirmaster of the Cappella Giulia at St. Peter’s, and then (irregularly, since its statutes debarred married men) as a member of the still more prestigious Cappella Sistina, the pope’s personal choir. When Paul IV succeeded Palestrina’s patron, after the very brief reign of Marcellus II, he enforced the rules more strictly, and Palestrina had to move to the musically less rewarding basilica of St. John Lateran, but for the last 20 years of his life he settled at the Cappella Giulia once more. It would be easy to present the aspects of Palestrina’s music that appealed to the prelates of counter-reformation Rome in purely negative terms: it never obscures clear declamation of the text, yet never sacrifices musical good manners to detailed illustration or vivid expression of that text. This would be to miss the positive quality of radiant serenity that Palestrina’s music embodies, particularly in his more than a hundred settings of the mass. Aeterna Christi munera is based on a hymn in honour of the Apostles whose melody, at least in the version Palestrina knew, is of almost folksong-like simplicity. But there is nothing simple about the way in which he takes advantage of its emphasis on the first, third, fifth, and eventually sixth degrees of the major scale; without any literal repetition every section exploits this sense of confident upward movement. Within this placid context such touches as the harmonic colour at “ex Maria virgine” or the rising bass scale at “vivos” (both in the Credo) tell immediately, as does the warmth of an extra tenor part in the final Agnus Dei and the archaic “fauxbourdon” sound of the parallel sixth-chords at “dona nobis pacem”. Although there is much uncertainty about the dating of Palestrina’s masses, there is no reason to think that this one was composed much before he published it in 1590; this is the simplicity of ripeness, not inexperience. Of the three motets on this recording, none is strictly speaking liturgical, so all are freely composed, without reference to a pre-existing plainchant. Sicut cervus (its livelier second part is omitted here) and Super flumina, both with texts from the Book of Psalms and both published in 1584, are perfect examples of Palestrina’s restrained pathos. In the former the emphasis is on elegantly balanced lyricism; the latter, with its evocation of the Babylonian exile, contains some more overtly rhetorical touches, as at the chordal setting of “illic sedimus”. O bone Jesu, whose non-biblical text belongs to the realm of personal devotion, is much more homophonic in style; it is probably the earliest of these pieces, for it was published in 1575. Two things distinguish Lassus among the great composers of the high Renaissance: his extraordinary creativity (his list of individual compositions runs to something like 2000) and his equally extraordinary diversity. Fluency is natural in any genius born into a thriving tradition, of course; Lassus’s native territory had supplied Europe with some of its finest composers for three generations and more. We can assume that his early training at the church of St. Nicholas in Mons was thorough, even though he was not able to enjoy it for long. At the age of about twelve or fourteen he was recruited into the service of Ferrante Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua’s younger brother and the Emperor’s commander-in-chief- also a keen music-lover who maintained his own chapel. As soon as his military duties in the Low Countries were hnished, Ferdinando set off for Sicily, where he was the Imperial Viceroy. Lassus was thus plunged at an unusually early age into the most dynamic and cultivated artistic environment in Europe. He stayed in Italy some nine or ten years, at Palermo, Milan, Naples and finally Rome, where he was appointed choirmaster at St. John Lateran in his early twenties. After two years in Rome he received word that his parents were ill; he hurried north once more, but both were dead on his arrival. Talent gravitates towards prosperity, and for the next year or two we find Lassus at Antwerp, a centre of the new trade of music-publishing. Here he attracted the attention of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria’s agent, and probably in the autumn of 1556 he moved to Munich, which was to be his home for the rest of his life. But his early travels had already marked him with his chameleon gift of mimicry: the volume he brought out with the Antwerp printer Susato contained serious and popular Italian madrigals, French chansons, Latin motets both sacred and secular. Throughout his Munich years he continued to compose in all these genres, even adding to them that of the German secular song, but this recording is concerned only with that part of his output (by far the largest) which was devoted to the church. The earliest surviving edition of his famous setting of the Penitential Psalms (from which Domine, ne in furore tuo comes) was published in Munich in 1584, but that is not the date of the psalms themselves: Lassus’s dedicatory letter tells us that they had been composed some 25 years previously and reserved for the Duke’s private use. Albrecht was keenly interested in the movement for the reform of Roman Catholic church music, at a time when the whole existence of polyphony was threatened (not for the first or the last time) by radical members of the clergy. The matter came up for discussion at the Council of Trent during 1562-63, with further deliberations by a commision of cardinals in Rome during the two following years. Lassus’s recently composed settings of the Penitential Psalms represent the ideal of a purified polyphony that helped Albrecht and his party to carry the day. O mors, quam amara est was first published in Paris in 1564; it shares with the Penitential Psalms its air of sober, not to say sombre, reflection (the grimly moralizing text is taken from Ecclesiasticus 41, 1-4) but its six voices give Lassus more scope for textural and rhythmic variety. The two remaining pieces on this recording, both Marian antiphons, were composed some twenty years later, to judge by the dates at which they were copied into the Munich chapel choirbooks. Both show Lassus in a freer, less austere guise; neither quotes the well-known plainsong melodies, though he makes use of those in other settings. Ave Regina caelorum is an exquisite miniature for four voices. Salve Regina is utterly different in character, rich and homophonic where the other is transparently contrapuntal. Lassus divides his six voices here into blocks of contrasting sound, very much in the Venetian manner (he was well acquainted with both the Gabrielis). Here too there are touches which we might almost regard as “madrigalisms”: the run on “vita”, the caught breath before “suspiramus”, above all the melodic inflections that underline the pathos of words like “lacrimarum” and “misericordes” with the flat sixth degree (E flat), and the sweetness of “dulcis virgo Maria” with a shift from B flat to B natural. Jeremy Noble