Word: palestrina
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Presenting an ambitious offering of sacred and profane music, the Harvard Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society over-extended themselves last night in a program that was often interesting, but, in toto, musically unsatisfying. The performances of music ranging from sixteenth century Palestrina and Gabrieli to a Hindemith setting of Walt Whitman continually emphasized text and style at the expense of sound, and the intricacies of the complex part singing were never fully realized by renditions not quite up to Harvard-Radcliffe standards...
...opening Palestrina works, a Sanctus for high and a Supplicationes for low voices were, perhaps, the best of the sacred offerings. The Radcliffe group has mellowed in the past year, although an absence of really first-rate soprano voices is still evident in the lovely Sanctus. Singing the Supplicationes with fine balance and diction, the low voices sacrificed some precision as Professor Woodworth wisely kept to the earnest simplicity of this work...
...Palestrina's exceedingly difficult Stabat Mater for 24 mixed voices, probably beyond the capabilities of the available performers, suffered from the apparently unquenchable desire of individual voices to stand out alone. The performance lacked both clarity and freshness; it continually dragged. Similar difficulties were encountered in the four Gabrieli selections, although the fine expression and phrasing in Monteverdi's Ohime Se Tanto Amate made up for lapses in technique. With the superb playing of six members of the New England Conservatory's brass department backing them up, the combined groups offered, in the final Jubilate Deo, some of the unrestrained...
...music, has, only through its association with Christmas, survived the fate of his other works so long relegated to the limbo of forgotten music. Only Bach has escaped the dense fog of obscurity that surrounds almost every composer before Haydn. It is lamentable enough that such acknowledged masters as Palestrina, Scarlatti, Corelli, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Boccherini should be worshipped from afar but rarely heard in American concert halls...
Father Finn had qualms about his two-hour concert of classic sacred music (Palestrina, Vittoria, Brahms, Mendelssohn); he thought it might be "a little on the gay side." To rehearse the sisters he had to modify the hardy rehearsal technique he had developed during 40 years with boys' choirs (stretching the singers out on table and piano tops for breathing exercises): "Of course, in the case of the sisters that just isn't done. . . . [They] are dedicated to an unworldly life. No Delilah business, you know...