This outstanding recording of ‘Music for Holy Saturday’ opens with two lessons from the third of Palestrina’s four settings of texts from Lamentations‚ passages chanted during the Office of Tenebrae on the last three days of Holy Week. Each verse of the original lessons opens with a letter from the Hebrew alphabet‚ and these letters‚ retained in the Latin translation‚ form an eloquent mini­prelude to what follows. The third lesson is Palestrina’s superb setting of the Prayer of Jeremiah. The performance is objectively straightforward‚ allowing the music‚ in its utter poignancy expressed with marked restraint‚ to speak for itself. The clarity of the individual voices is remarkable and the acoustic clear‚ yet warm: even the six part final cry‚ ‘Jerusalem…convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum’‚ comes across with perfect intelligibility. In the chanted liturgy each lesson is followed by a florid reponsory‚ and full marks should go to Musica Contexta for transcribing these chants from Giovanni Guidetti’s edition of 1587‚ which naturally comes from the right place and is of the right date. Guidetti’s underlay follows the principles of the Renaissance grammarians‚ who considered a single note for a tonic accent followed by a flow of notes on an unaccented syllable – the most frequently found underlay of the golden age of the chant – to be totally barbaric! Guidetti reverses with conviction that ancient practice each time in his noble ‘corrected’ version‚ but the outline of the traditional chant is still discernible. My personal preference regarding the responsories would have been to adopt a slower‚ more determinedly solemn style. But these singers are well on the way to achieving perfection here‚ and also in the little antiphon ‘Mulieres’ before and after Palestrina’s alternatim setting of the Benedictus. It was particularly interesting to hear them sing Palestrina’s wonderful Sicut cervus‚ with its surging phrases‚ and also his famous Stabat mater for double choir‚ displaying that dramatic alternation between antiphonal choir and combined choral sections. For maximum effect‚ more antiphonal distinction would have helped in the choir – versus – choir sections; but overall this was a well thought out and moving performance.