Here's a fine recording from Germany's Ensemble Officium of some of Palestrina works that aren't often heard but that are just as characteristic of his style as any of the more common masses and motets. Petrarch's set of sonnet stanzas entitled "Le vergini" (The Virgins) represent perhaps the ultimate transmutation of secular love into sacred fervor in the history of poetry; they are the culmination of a great cycle of sonnets addressed to the poet's beloved, Laura, who eventually becomes conflated in his mind with the ...
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Here's a fine recording from Germany's Ensemble Officium of some of Palestrina works that aren't often heard but that are just as characteristic of his style as any of the more common masses and motets. Petrarch's set of sonnet stanzas entitled "Le vergini" (The Virgins) represent perhaps the ultimate transmutation of secular love into sacred fervor in the history of poetry; they are the culmination of a great cycle of sonnets addressed to the poet's beloved, Laura, who eventually becomes conflated in his mind with the Virgin. There are 11 stanzas himself, but Palestrina set only eight, probably because it is possible (although by this stage of the Renaissance it is difficult to apply modal theory to polyphony) to assign one of these sacred madrigals to each church mode. They are indeed true sacred madrigals, not simply motets with an unusual text form; they are, for Palestrina, unusually vivid in depicting the text imagery, but they do so without losing the composer's characteristic well-modulated...
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