A workshop for voices for Thames Valley Early Music Forum
*Exploring Palestrina’s Missa Confitebor tibi Domine a8*
[As at 8 May: places open for Tenors and Basses; waiting list for Sopranos and Altos.]
In 2025 the musical world is celebrating 500 years since the birth of Italy’s greatest composer of the Renaissance: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
Prolific, prodigious and enduring, Palestrina’s music has never fallen out of circulation and, in subsequent centuries, has seemed to embody the values of the resurgent Catholic Church of the late 16th century in its technical perfection and aesthetic sublimity.
Palestrina wrote so many high-quality works that a large proportion remain unperformed in modern times, and for this workshop day we will focus intensely on a superb but little-known motet for double choir and the Mass setting based on it.
Palestrina published the wonderful Confitebor tibi Domine a8 in 1572, just after he returned as choirmaster of the Cappella Giulia (the choir which sings for services at St Peter’s, Rome when the Pope is not present). His treatment of the joyful text from Isaiah bursts with character and textural contrast, with voices constantly gathered into varying combinations. Within a few years he
had reworked the material for a Mass setting that was hand-copied into one of the papal choir’s manuscripts in about 1577 and published in 1585.
This workshop offers the opportunity to explore a truly joyful motet and Mass, and to see Palestrina’s compositional process at work, first in creating a characterful setting of scripture and then reworking his material to create a satisfying Mass setting. It should make for sunny summer’s day of music-making, whatever the weather!
Booking is via
https://www.tvemf.org.uk.
Fees: £16 for Early Music Forum members, £20 for non-members;
£5 for full-time students.
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