Held up as a model of polyphonic perfection even today - I recall species counterpoint lectures from my undergraduate days - his music is much more than a formal exercise or a jigsaw puzzle. Within that framework of technical exactitude he conveys the full range of emotions, from subdued penitence to triumphant exultation and rapturous longing. A popular legend (sadly unlikely to be true, but it's a great story) holds that his Missa Papae Marcelli so impressed the Pope that he immediately abandoned his plans to ban polyphonic music from the liturgy.
There's an enormous quantity of Palestrina out there - he was a truly prolific working composer - and it turns out that some of it has been overlooked right up to the present day. Hence this album from Graham Ross and his Choir of Clare College Cambridge, featuring five Palestrina works never recorded before. I thought it was fantastic (it was our Recording of the Week earlier in January) so I was eager to take the opportunity to talk to Graham about the album and the works on it - as well as a tantalising hint of an exciting, and utterly different, new musical venture he's undertaking this year.
People might be shocked to find that these works by perhaps the most prominent Renaissance composer have never been recorded until now, the five hundredth anniversary of his birth! Where have they been hiding, and how did you uncover them?
It is well documented that Palestrina was a prolific composer, writing more than 100 mass settings and 250 motets in his lifetime. It was when I was invited to conduct my first album with the Bevan Family Consort a few years back that the seed was planted for me to make a recording with my Choir of Clare College, Cambridge of some of these previously-unrecorded works: my friend and colleague Francis Bevan, who was singing on that recording, had made a performing edition of a Palestrina Mass that we were recording on that album. It became clear to me when chatting with Francis in the breaks between sessions that so much of Palestrina’s oeuvre had still yet to be recorded. The opportunity to do this and release our Clare album as part of the quincentenary seemed a perfect fit. Francis helped suggest various pieces to me, and in the end I selected a programme of two remarkable Lenten Mass settings – the 4-part Missa Emendemus in Melius and the 5-part Missa Memor esto verbi tui, with its motet of the same name – alongside a triple-choir setting of Psalm 123, Ad te levavi oculos meos, and a magnificent 5-part Magnificat secundi toni. My Choir in Cambridge is steeped in the English choral tradition, and I was therefore keen to place Palestrina’s works into historical context by including settings of the same texts by some of his English contemporaries: William Byrd, Robert White, and William Mundy. I think that these make for fascinating side-by-side comparisons not only of different text settings, but of the different European styles at that time.
How would you say they measure up against the popular Palestrina favourites like the Missa Papae Marcelli or Tu es Petrus?
I think these newly-recorded Palestrina works are every bit as impressive as the well-known established works of his output. There is always an elegantly-crafted musical line, clarity of text setting across the voice parts, and large-scale architecture at play. There are countless examples of a great master at work in all the pieces we recorded here. Take the Missa Memor esto verbi tui for example: listen to how exquisitely the two tenor parts seamlessly weave in and out of each other within the five-part texture; or how the most intimate shift of harmony is saved for the ‘Jesu Christe’ text in the Gloria; how the briefest moment of homophony makes for a beautifully expressive moment at the very centre of the Mass for the ‘et incarnatus est’ of the Credo; or the subtle touches of removing the lowest voice altogether for the Credo’s ‘Crucifixus’ section and at the start of the Sanctus which present a wonderfully bass-light ascent to the heavens for the resurrection and a singing of the holy angels respectively. I could go on - there are simply so many wonderful moments on every page. In Ad te levavi there is a feast of musical interplay between three equally-balanced choirs, in contrast to the elegant simplicity of single chant employed in alternate verses of the Magnificat. This is all such beautifully-crafted music which feels every bit as fresh now as it must have been when it was composed.
You mention having made this recording ‘in the round’ - what inspired this, and how did it work in practice? Did you have each voice-part in one place, or were the singers all mixed together?
In Clare Chapel we sing in the traditional collegiate set-up of antiphonal choirs of Decani and Cantoris, but in our recording sessions this often becomes two or three long lines in a semi-circle. There is nothing wrong with this formation - indeed, we often record in this way - but the very nature of Palestrina’s polyphony is that every part feeds off each other: direct imitations occur frequently, and often different voices (not necessarily adjacent in voice part) are paired together. I wanted therefore to record this music in a way that our singers could react as freely and easily with each other as possible in order to really bring these scores to life for the first time on record. Doing this in the round was therefore the obvious choice to me for this, inspired by the recording sessions for my Icelandic album in which pandemic restrictions at the time forced us to place all the string players of The Dmitri Ensemble similarly in a large circle - and the resulting sound was pretty heavenly, it must be said. Whilst I do often ‘scramble’ my singers in performances and recordings, for this Palestrina album the singers of each voice part were kept together to facilitate uniformity of line, phrasing and breath. I hope that listeners of the album can hear the interplay between the different parts, imagining themselves in the middle of the round with the polyphony encircling them.
What’s it like to conduct in the middle of it all, rather than from the front?
I got the best seat in the house, shared with the microphones! One has to be a little more balletic on their feet to work with all parts of the ensemble around you, but practically-speaking it’s not otherwise much different from conducting out front. But I hope that the end result of recording this way for the performers, and thus in turn for the listeners, is a wholly satisfying one for this repertoire.
We hear you’re heading down to Antarctica shortly for a composing residency in association with the Scott Polar Research Institute - can you tell us more about this?
I’ve been appointed Musician in Residence 2025 for Friends of Scott Polar Research Institute, where I’ll be spending five weeks on board HMS Protector, the Royal Navy’s ice-patrol ship, as part of a composition residency like no other. I’ll be writing a new work about the Antarctic region which will be premiered by the BBC Singers in due course. It’s an incredible opportunity and I’m very excited to get started.
Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, Graham Ross
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