Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Celebrating 501 Years

As we celebrate the 501 anniversary of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's birth, we may pause to wonder if we have come to take for granted his music due to the towering influence it holds on compositional technique. Yet, it is not for the technical alone that we revere him. His music spans the centuries through the devotion to what Richard Wagner called "an almost equally space-and timeless image, a totally spiritual revelation which grips us with inexpressible emotion, because it brings to our consciousness the innermost nature of religion free from any dogmatic conceptual fiction." It bears remembering that he was a man who embraced the change of the times with the Council of Trent, worked in low paid church positions until the tragic passing of his brother, his wife and two of his three children during the black plague, nearly went into the priesthood as a result but remarried a wealthy widow. Through all of this he composed hundreds of works - an outpouring from a man clearly devoted to his faith and its expression through music. In this concert we will dip a toe into this vast collection and hear a selection of Palestrina's sacred and secular works along with a new work influenced by the Renaissance by Damian Jordan.

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