This disc offers an almost unknown work from Palestrina's large corpus: the early Missa O Regem Coeli, from around 1554. The young Palestrina was always somewhat neglected during the period when Palestrina was venerated over all other Renaissance composers, perhaps because that phase of his career didn't fit the grand historical narrative by which the composer rescued music from the dictates of the Council of Trent by writing beautiful works that complied with the mandated text intelligibility, and "blushed and grieved" to ...
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This disc offers an almost unknown work from Palestrina's large corpus: the early Missa O Regem Coeli, from around 1554. The young Palestrina was always somewhat neglected during the period when Palestrina was venerated over all other Renaissance composers, perhaps because that phase of his career didn't fit the grand historical narrative by which the composer rescued music from the dictates of the Council of Trent by writing beautiful works that complied with the mandated text intelligibility, and "blushed and grieved" to have written secular madrigals. The whole story has the reek of Romantic mythmaking. And in any case, the music on this disc helps give it the lie. The Missa O Regem Coeli, in four voices, is a parody mass (also known as an imitation mass) with a motet by Flemish composer Andreas de Silva as a model; the disc opens with the model. Palestrina's mass does not have the carefully worked out density of his later masses, and indeed of the Stabat Mater, Nunc dimittis, and motet Tu es Petrus...
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