BAEZA / Palestrina's “Song of Songs” by La Grande Chapelle: Text and chiaroscuro

08/12/2025 / Scherzo. César Rus

Baeza. San Francisco Auditorium. 06-XII-2025. La Grande Chapelle. Albert Recasens, director. Palestrina: Canticum Canticorum

The Úbeda and Baeza Early Music Festival presented a co-production of one of the great works of 16th-century polyphony, namely Palestrina's Fourth Book of Motets, better known as Canticum Canticorum (Song of Songs). As Albert Recasens, director of La Grande Chapelle, explained in the programme notes, Palestrina wrote this volume, consisting of 29 motets, as a kind of musical cycle in which there is not only thematic unity due to the chosen source (The Song of Songs), but also musical unity due to the relationship between the modes chosen in the different motets. In fact, it can be divided into four groups according to this modal distribution, as indicated in the programme. This cyclical conception is fascinating from a contemporary perspective, as it seems to prelude nineteenth-century conceptions, although the truth is that the work, published in 1584, was already a notable success in its day.

Now, while this overall conception of the work is fascinating, when one delves into the details of each of the motets, Palestrina's creation is dazzling. In particular, and as Recasens also points out, the composer's use of counterpoint in the service of the word, and specifically in the particular dialogue-like writing of the text, is fundamental. In this sense, Palestrina sometimes simplifies the contrapuntal language by also resorting to parallelisms that generate what we could define as a certain underlining effect on the text, so that certain phrases or words appear with ethereal clarity, as if in relief compared to others. This is also one of the secrets with which Palestrina achieves a lyrical and emotional work that manages to captivate today's audience despite being almost 450 years old.

The motets, which were written for five voices, were performed by Raquel Mendes (cantus), David Sagastume (altus), Achim Schulz (tenor), Jérémie Couleau (quintus) and Pieter Stas (bassus). They are all excellent singers who are well versed in the style and technique required for this music. They particularly excelled in their dynamic performance, filling their interpretation with nuances. In this regard, Recasens' approach appears to prioritise the transmission of the text's semantics over the main interpretative decisions, with dynamics and accents serving this purpose. The result was an exceptional aesthetic experience, with one of the greatest works of Western music performed by sensitive and skilled musicians for an attentive audience filling the San Francisco Auditorium.