Requiem

Our Requiem album follows the structure of the traditional Mass of the Dead, closely in some respects but loosely in others. It is far-ranging in time and space, with pieces of music written in Italy and Germany over a period of some 350 years. Our aim was to create a programme featuring a spectrum from loss and death to hope and light.

Missa brevis by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was published in the composer's third book of masses in 1570. It illustrates the changes brought to the Catholic liturgy by the Counter-Reformation: the importance and comprehensibility of the text was brought to the forefront, and music was decreed to be subservient to the text. In the Kyrie, Palestrina brings the voices together after an imitative opening, condensing the expressive power of the music and then thinning it out again towards the end of the section.

Where the Kyrie is introvert and meditative, the Sanctus is definitely extrovert. The bell-like gestures in the opening cries and the flowing downward figures depict the glory that fills heaven and earth. The Benedictus is gentler and features upwardly mobile figures in contrast. The Agnus Dei is, like the Kyrie, a gently flowing piece. The second section is in five parts, as was common in Roman practice at the time (with two soprano parts in canon). The concluding Dona nobis pacem rises to an intensive culmination before its tranquil ending.

Giaches de Wert was a composer from the Low Countries who created a career in the service of the house of Gonzaga in Milan and Mantua in Italy. He is known particularly for his highly expressive madrigals. His motet Adesto dolori meo reflects perhaps not only the intensity of his madrigal writing but also the personal hardships that he endured in the 1560s. The text is a responsory from the Mass for the Dead, set by de Wert in a bold chromatic idiom with much word-painting.

Orlando di Lasso, a compatriot of de Wert's who spent the latter part of his life in Munich, suffered from severe depression in his last years. His final work, Lagrime di San Pietro (The tears of St Peter), somehow reflects his mental state at the time. The extensive poem by Luigi Tansillo on which it is based describes what Peter felt at the very moment when he realized that he had denied his Lord. What makes the work particularly autobiographical is that it is highly likely that it was never intended to be performed at all.

Lagrime di San Pietro is an apotheosis to Lasso's career. Completed only a few months before his death, it contains features from the music of the Low Countries that he adopted in his youth, but also from the polychoral style and the world of the Renaissance madrigal. Though the overall mood of the music is sombre and poignant, there are also glimmers of hope.

Heinrich Schьtz studied with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice as a young man. His music follows the ideals of the Renaissance: each section of text is given a musical shape of its own, the voice-leading is elegant and the dissonances subtle. The firm connection of the music to the text is apparent at the very opening of the motet Unser Wandel ist im Himmel: the heaven-aspiring sequences reach upwards, while those describing that which comes from heaven flow downwards.

The motets for All Hallows' Day in the collection Geistliche Chormusik (1648) - Die mit Trдnen sдen in five parts and Selig sind die Toten in six parts - present different sides of Schьtz's musical idiom. In the former, the descriptions of worldly suffering and the joy of the hereafter are sharply contrasted, the chromatic writing closely reminiscent of Renaissance madrigals. In the latter, the voice parts are constantly regrouped as if emulating the Venetian polychoral style. The arrested movement on the words "Sie ruhen" ('they rest') is particularly striking.

Italian 20th-century composer Ildebrando Pizzetti was interested in early music, which is evident in his own compositions too. His major vocal work, largely forgotten today like the rest of his output, is the Requiem (1923). The eight-part Dies irae from this work is based on a Gregorian chant, provided with flowing counter-melodies, alternating polyphonic and homophonic sequences. The music draws on Renaissance voice-leading and purebred Neo-Classicism albeit combined with late Romantic harmonies.

Kari Turunen
Translation: Jaakko Mдntyjдrvi