This series has for some time been pointing towards a more sensuous, sensitive Palestrina than many of us expected. Poor Palestrina has a difficult place in music history: it’s hard work having to save the whole future of Renaissance church music while only being known for the Missa Papae Marcelli. I think in the late ’80s it became apparent, particularly with the Hilliard Ensemble’s Canticum canticorum (Erato, 8/86) and The Tallis Scholars’ Missa Assumpta est Maria (Gimell, 9/90), that there was more to this music than perhaps counterpoint textbooks had let on. In this series, Harry Christophers certainly acknowledges Palestrina as ‘the master craftsman’ while also treating him as an artist capable of highly subtle textures inspired by his desire to clearly portray the words he sets.

On the face of it, a Mass based on a hexachord cantus firmus does not sound promising, yet you would have no idea from the flowing mellifluous lines in the Missa Ut re mi fa sol la that the second soprano is repeatedly tracing this stepwise movement, and there you have the genius of great counterpoint. After a somewhat tentative Kyrie, both Palestrina and these singers find new energy in the Gloria, which is full of joyful homophonic textures with a strong rhythmic profile. Harry Christophers has an affinity for upper-voice sections, and there is a lovely example in the Credo starting on ‘Crucifixus etiam pro nobis’.

Further on there are many thoughtful and nuanced moments in his motets for St John the Baptist: particularly in the second part of Fuit homo missus a Deo, with its fragmentation of homophonic passages on ‘et pararet Domino plebem perfectam’ (‘and to prepare for the Lord a perfect people’), or the solid musical architecture of Misso Herodes, which receives a stern vocal tone as Herod commands the decapitation of St John. But perhaps the finest moments are in the motets from the Song of Songs, which seem to catch Palestrina at his most sensuous. Those falling phrases in ‘Descendi in hortum meum’, for instance, are ravishing.