There is music you recognise right away, as if it were imprinted on our collective memory. Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Requiem is one such work: a great blanket of sound, full of hope and trust, that wraps comfortingly around you. Written for the funeral of Empress Maria of Austria, this is no scream of despair, but a paragon of genuinely felt serenity: voices that carry, embrace and release each other in a play of shadow and light. Tenebrae breathes life into the Requiem with transparent textures in which every nuance lights up like a spark. The six voices in the polyphony unfurl like a living organism, sober when necessary, intense when the moment demands. The motets of Victoria’s contemporary, Alonso Lobo, give further colour to the programme: more earthly, more chromatic and somewhat restless, as if the shifting spirit of the times were scratching away at the Renaissance sound.
Program
T.L. de Victoria: Missa pro defunctis, à 6
Performers
Nigel Short, artistic director