Music by Palestrina provides the backbone for the programme the Sixteen is bringing to Britain's cathedrals and churches on this year's choral pilgrimage. The Kyrie and the Agnus Dei from Palestrina's Missa Regina Coeli open and close the evening, which also includes his eight-voice Stabat Mater and two motets – but the real substance comes from two settings of the Miserere, by Allegri and James MacMillan.
The version of Allegri's work that is so well known today, with its unadorned lines for the second choir, the abrupt modulation halfway through their verses and the soprano soaring to a top C, bears relatively little similarity to the piece that was so jealously guarded by the Vatican in the 17th and 18th centuries, and which the 13-year-old Mozart supposedly wrote down from a single hearing in 1770. The Sixteen is performing an edition based on research by Ben Byram-Wigfield that is much closer to what Allegri might have envisaged – there are no modulations or top Cs, but the lines of the second choir are lavishly ornamented. There is a concession to modern sentiment, though, when the final verses revert to the familiar and undeniably beautiful, if musicologically corrupt, version.
MacMillan's Miserere, composed last year for Harry Christophers and the Sixteen, is a wonderfully sustained, beautifully paced and varied setting, with its own moment of catharsis when it dissolves into purest E major for the final stanzas. The beautifully judged programme also includes three of his Strathclyde Motets, providing the perfect contrast to the late-renaissance polyphony around them. Christophers has planned and prepared it all with his usual care and attention; it was all immaculately performed by the group's 18 members, their diction crystal-clear, their intonation faultless.
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