Palestrina's 29 motets setting words drawn from the Song of Songs were first published in Venice in 1584 disguised under the bland title of the Motettorum quinque vocibus, liber quartus. The work is undoubtedly one of the composer's finest achievements and created a considerable impact upon his contemporaries. During his lifetime as many as nine editions were published within the span of ten years, and in 1613 (19 years after Palestrina's death) the work was again reissued with a figured bass part added to accommodate more recent-fashions. Quite apart from its purely musical qualities, the success of the cycle may have been partly due to its unusual conception as a large-scale integrated work based on a powerfully ambiguous text. For while Churchmen could maintain that the love of the Royal Bridegroom for the Shulamite could be equated with that of Christ for the Church, in a world accustomed to the poetry of Guarini and Tesso nothing could hide the erotic and at times salacious character of the words themselves.
This ambiguity carries important interpretational implications. Should Palestrina's pieces be sung as conventional motets, stately and dignified, or more as madrigals, with every nuance of the underscored? That distinctions and problems of this kind were uppermost in Palestrina's mind is clear from his preface to the Liber quartus where he admits that he has used ''a style rather more spirited than I am wont to employ in Church compositions'', but hastens to add that he has followed the official doctrinal interpretation of the Song. As if to underline the point he continues with an apology for some secular madrigals that he had written as a young man. Palestrina's music, which is markedly madrigalistic in approach, only intensifies the dilemma.
The extent to which this new recording of the entire cycle is admired will largely depend on personal attitudes towards what kind of pieces they really are. It should be said at the outset that the high technical standards of performance which we have come to associate with the Hilliard Ensemble are very much in evidence. Balance and intonation are excellent, and the pieces are performed with just one singer to a part, as ideally this music should be. The result is a clarity of texture which reveals the detail of every line. Speeds have been thoughtfully chosen, allowing the bass to function, as it must in this style, as the motor of the music. Yet despite these qualities, the overall approach seems too detached, almost mechanical and impersonal at times. Certainly there could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the Hilliard's performance, and that of Cantores in Ecclesia issued some 12 years ago (L'Oiseau-Lyre SOL338/9, 10/74—nla), where a richly romanticized approach accompanies a frankly secular view of the work. Fashions in performance have certainly changed in the intervening period, but at least part of that contrast is to be explained by fixed ideas of the 'Palestrina style' and the quite special problems of these remarkable pieces.'