LF 26:A Celebration of Palestrina and Bach

Our Lady of Loretto, Musselburgh 9/9/26

The Marian Consort (director Rory McCleery)

English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble (director Gawain Glenton)

One of the great glories of the Lammermuir Festival is its diversity of content. The variety of concerts and venues, while always maintaining the highest of artistic levels, is stunning, and should be celebrated. My first three concerts this year represent a microcosm of this aspect, going from Mozart concerti, via English Song, to a celebration of Palestrina and Bach, in three beautiful venues.

Wednesday evening’s concert, given by the Marian Consort and the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, in the delightful setting of Our Lady of Loretto in Musselburgh, was a splendid example. This small church, converted from a Mission Chapel into a Catholic church in 1880, and rebuilt in 1903 with a glorious altar and sanctuary adorned with gold leaf artwork, is a veritable jewel, with an excellent acoustic, perfect for early music. I had remembered from a previous visit that the pews were spartan, so, with the addition of a cushion, I settled down to enjoy a fascinating concert, curated by Rory McCleery, the director of the Marians, showing us how Bach was deeply influenced by Palestrina, and celebrating the way the great master musician of Leipzig used the legacy of Palestrina and the Venetian school, along with the German masters of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, to create an entirely new sound world of his own.

The discovery of a score of Palestrina’s Missa Sine Nomine, clearly for performance with parts for instruments (cornetti and trombones) doubling the six part choir, in Bach’s extensive library, gives us an amazing insight into performance practice in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach took up the post of music director in 1723. This concert revealed some of the pieces probably played and sung there during Bach’s time and ended with a performance of his motet, ‘Komm, Jesu, Komm’, using the same instrumental forces, although with double choir in eight parts, as the Palestrina mass.

An anthology of 16th century polyphonic motets, published in Leipzig in 1603 and reprinted with additions in 1621, the Florilegium Portense, was the source material for Bach, and for this concert, and what a superb concert it was. The Marian Consort, here consisting of 8 singers, mostly singing one to a part, has become one of Britain’s top vocal ensembles, and we were treated to a beautifully conceived programme, built round a performance of the Palestrina mass, with the players of the instrumental ensemble adding their unique sound to the choral polyphony. It’s a mass I don’t know, and yet it displays all the characteristic genius of the composer, and his perfect understanding of Renaissance polyphony, with all the individual voices creating a totally homogenous sound. That sound was solidly founded on the excellent bass voices of Jon Stainsby and Rob Macdonald, who formed the base on which everything above was able to flourish, and especially in ‘Komm, Jesu, Komm’, they were able to let rip as only basses can! As a bass myself, I recall the pleasure of being asked to give a little more sometimes, since the usual cry was “Shut up, basses!”

Most of the concert featured the Consort and the Ensemble performing together, but there were a few pieces for choir alone and for cornett and sackbut alone, as well as one piece for solo voices with accompaniment, Heinrich Schütz’s motet ‘Sehet an den Feigenbaum’. This parable of the fig tree allows the composer to twine the two vocal parts, Caroline Halls (soprano) and Will Wright (tenor), round the instruments like branches of a tree.

A standout work for me was Annibale Stabile’s Nunc Dimittis for 8 voices, a terrific piece which really showed the Consort at its best. Stabile (c 1535-1595) worked mainly in Rome, describing himself as a pupil of Palestrina, and who was master of music at several of the top Roman churches, culminating in a position at Santa Maria Maggiore from 1591-1594. In 1595, he took up a post as master of music at the court of King Sigismund III of Poland, but died that same year in Cracow. I bet the Poles loved both his music and his cool name!

The culmination of the concert was clearly the superb performance of Bach’s ‘Komm, Jesu, Komm’, a fabulous motet, demonstrating the composer’s understanding of Renaissance polyphony but also his ability to transform the old style into something completely new and daring. The combination of the Consort and the Ensemble was able to highlight the genius of Bach, and the applause at the end was warm and generous, giving them the chance to perform a bit of Bach’s motet, ‘O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht’ as an encore. This was the work that used the same forces as the Palestrina mass, and we were left with the warm sound of instruments and voices ringing pleasantly in our ears as we stepped out into the autumnal Musselburgh evening.