Oslo International Church Music Festival

Top British choir with beautiful Renaissance programme

It is a pleasure to welcome back to the festival the world-leading English choir Polyphony and conductor Stephen Layton. At the concert they perform Stabat Mater by the English Renaissance composer John Browne (1453–c.1500) who lived during the Tudor period. Little is known about Browne himself, but his compositions, which are preserved in The Eton Choirbook from the beginning of the 16th century, testify to a particularly innovative and inventive composer. Half a century after Brown's death, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) composed Missa Papae Marcelli, which is considered one of the most central choral works of the Renaissance. The Mass was composed in the late 1550s to the memory of Pope Marcellus II, who held office for only three weeks before he died. The Mass has been popular for over 450 years, primarily due to the perfect combination of form and content. One of the great challenges for much of the vocal music from this period is the use of extensive polyphony which made the text in the Mass obscure and difficult to follow. Palestrina's solution would become the methodological basis for the compositional technique of vocal music in the centuries that followed. The text was sung with clear and precise pronunciation in wavy cadences, with tension and relaxation connected to the arpeggiated tonic triad and its associated melodic scale. This diatonic approach to harmony is characteristic of what we today call tonal music, and much of the credit for inventing this goes to Palestrina. The concert ends with beautiful choral works from our times by two award-winning contemporary composers. These works are Salutation and Sun Dogs (ii) by the Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds and Nunc Dimittis by the Polish composer Paweł Łukaszewski.