Word: palestrina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During a rehearsal shortly after he had become coach, Davison asked the members to try a little Mendelssohn piece called "Der Jagers Abschied." They did it "out of curosity," and they liked it. After Mendelssohn came Bach and Palestrina and finally Stravinsky...
During the Dark Ages, Fortuna's temples were looted down to their bones. Even their marble facings were carted away for building material. Gradually the town of Palestrina and the feudal stronghold of the Colonna family spread over the massive remains, effectively hiding them from archeologists. In 1944, Allied bombings peeled away the medieval buildings. When the war ended, Palestrina was a wreck, but the lower parts of Fortuna's temple lay almost undamaged under heaps of rubble...
Born in 1567, the son of a doctor in Cremona (where the Stradivari were later to make violins), Monteverdi was a child of the late Renaissance. He was taught the same rigid rules of church composition as Palestrina, but quickly showed revolutionary tendencies: his madrigals, which he began publishing at 20, were damned for their "illegal" chords. By the time of his death in 1643, he had discovered harmonies which might have given Wagner himself a turn, sizzled the Italian ear with its first violin tremolos, startled it with its first plucked strings, and helped set music on an entirely...
...program was so discriminatingly planned that I cannot forebear some discussion of it. There chief strands of late 16th century music were brought together. Clement's famous Adoramus and a Benedictus by Palestrina represented what was called the stile antico, a restrained contrapuntal style used in orthodox church music. Giovanni Gabrieli's dazzling Symphoniae Sacrae combined elements of both the Renaissance splendor of Venice and the Baroque love o the spectacular; finally, a number of chansons by Lassus, Arcadelt, and Regnard exemplified the piquant secular songs of the period...
...century were, in fact, performed, but the late Renaissance idiom so strongly pervaded the evening that I, for one, found myself judging these other works by 16th century standards. Thus Verdi's setting of Dante's Hymn to the Virgin Mary seemed maudlin after the more ethereal fervency of Palestrina. I do not know whether Verdi's melodramatic climaxes and sensuous cadences are inherently unsuited for religious music, but their operatic association have certainly made them so for me. Even Mozart did not fare well in such company, perhaps because the firmly established tonalities of his Ave Verum Corpus seemed...