Last month I watched conductor Harry Christophers blow through what sounded like an arthritic harmonica but in fact was a pure-toned pitch pipe, which handed the singers of his vocal group the Sixteen their starting notes. Then the Kyrie from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Missa Regina coeli unfolded inside the resonant splendour of St James’s Church in Mayfair and, 500 years after his birth, I grasped why Palestrina, maestro di cappella of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome from 1551-5, still has the capacity to surprise.
Christophers and the Sixteen are celebrating this greatest of the late Renaissance composers in his anniversary year with three concerts promoted by the Wigmore Hall but held at St James’s: this music lives or dies by the acoustic in which it is heard. That first concert returned me to my days as a music student trying my best to unpick, then put back together, Palestrina scores, always with a sinking feeling that I might as well be unscrambling Einstein’s theory of relativity; this was advanced mathematics, not music. The point was never made that Palestrina laid down rules because he had listened carefully to the acoustics of churches not dissimilar to St James’s, then conceived a compositional approach that led him to create music of unfailing luminosity.
A second anniversary concert on 18 June will focus on Palestrina’s music depicting the Last Supper, and then there’s a gap until the final instalment of the series on 22 October. The very idea that anyone attending these concerts might have heard weak links in his robust chains of sound would have filled Palestrina with dread and that’s where those rules came in.
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