St George’s Bristol
The consummate vocal ensemble beautifully highlighted symbolic connections between the 16th-century Italian composer and soon-to-be 90 Arvo Pärt

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of Palestrina, the Italian composer who took the name of his native town, just east of Rome, now part of the metropolitan city. In director Peter Phillips’s inspired pairing of Palestrina with the music of Arvo Pärt in the year of his 90th birthday, there was a particular frisson in knowing that in January, the Tallis Scholars had sung this very programme in the cathedral of Sant’Agapito Martire in Palestrina, where the young Giovanni Pierluigi may have been a chorister and was certainly organist from the age of 19.

Phillips has described Palestrina as the “most consummate of renaissance composers”: it may surely be said that the Tallis Scholars are the consummate vocal ensemble. Opening with his motet Surge Illuminare, the 10 Scholars immediately brought a shining warmth to the St George’s auditorium, the clarity of the polyphonic lines as notable as their impeccable diction. This was followed by the Missa Brevis, only marginally shorter than the hundred plus others and exemplifying the infinite care with which Palestrina set the words of the Ordinary, the Scholars’ use of dynamic and tonal colour, as well the attention to changes of metre, vividly achieved. After the Kyrie’s gentle plea for mercy, the Gloria was indeed gloriously rich. Three solo voices – soprano, alto and tenor – brought a serene calm to the Benedictus, contrasting with the then full-bodied and joyous Hosanna, before the heartfelt plea for peace of the Agnus Dei.