Concert at St Cross, 17 May 2025

To celebrate 500 years since the birth of Palestrina, Cambridge Renaissance Voices presents a glorious programme of music from 16th-century Rome, where he began and ended his career as Maestro di Cappella at St Peter's. 

Buy tickets: £15 in advance (£17.50 on the door)

Palestrina's place in musical history rests on his extraordinary output of over 100 masses and 250 motets; the sheer beauty of their flowing and harmonious contrapuntal style earned him great fame and many imitators.  

While Palestrina and his successor at St Peter's, Felice Anerio, were native to Rome and spent their entire careers there, the tradition of sacred music in in the Papal City was by no means exclusively Italian.  In the 15th century, the Borgia Popes reflected their Spanish origins by employing musicians from Spain in the Papal chapel.  This tradition continued under Pope Paul III, who employed Cristobal de Morales as a tenor in the choir of the Sistine Chapel from 1535.  Palestrina was meanwhile singing in the Capella Giulia at St Peter's as a boy treble, and it is highly likely that Morales's works were in their repertoire.  In the decade which Morales spent in Rome, he published two books of masses; his motets appeared in over 30 printed sources in the mid-16th century, as well as many manuscript collections.

A decade after Morales's death, Spain's most celebrated Renaissance composer, Tomas Luis de Victoria, arrived in Rome.  He spent over 20 years working at the Jesuit German College and the Pontifical Roman Seminary, where he succeeded Palestrina as Maestro di Cappella.  While Victoria's music undoubtedly shows Palestrina's influence, it combines the fluent serenity of his polyphony with a new level of spiritual and emotional intensity, employing dramatic dissonances to profoundly moving effect.