Tonight’s program focuses on extended works by two master composers writing in highly contrasting styles. Palestrina’s strict counterpoint gives each voice part equally important melodic lines woven around simple chords, whereas Rautavaara’s masterpiece is predominantly block chords without counterpoint but with lush harmonic movement. In yet a different approach, we conclude the evening with the richness of Baroque invention as we continue our cycle of Bach motets.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born in the small town of Palestrina, southeast of Rome, in 1525. Regarded as the pre-eminent composer of his time, for 23 years he held the post of maestro di cappella in the Julian Chapel at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Unlike the reputations of most composers, which quickly decline as tastes and styles change, Palestrina’s star kept rising for centuries after he died in 1594. Even by the standard of his prolific contemporary Lassus, Palestrina’s work was prodigious. Although he did write madrigals, it is his tremendous oeuvre of sacred music that won him lasting fame. He wrote 104 masses, half of them published during his lifetime, as well as six books of motets, which became the standard for pedagogical use, even to this day.

Canticum canticorum, or The Song of Songs, occupies a unique position in Palestrina’s output. While it was common enough in the Renaissance for composers to set texts from the Song of Solomon, it was extraordinary to set a whole series of them. Stylistically, these motets, as Palestrina called them, are really more akin to madrigals, with their word painting and traces of dance rhythms. In his high position in Rome, he must have been wary of appearing to indulge in unbridled secularity, for when publishing his Fourth Book of Motets, 29 of which constitute Canticum canticorum, Palestrina explained the special nature of this music in the dedication of the volume to his employer, Pope Gregory XIII.

There exist all too many poems on the theme of love far removed from the Christian faith: many composers, seized by passion or corrupted by youth, wished to set them to music, but, however praiseworthy their skill, the faults of their material cause offense among good and upright men. I was one of their number, and I blush and grieve. But since the past cannot be changed or deeds undone, I have adopted a different plan. Formerly I set texts in praise of our Lord Jesus Christ and his most holy Mother, the Virgin Mary, but this time I have chosen the Song of Solomon, which expresses the divine love of Christ for his spiritual bride. I have made use of a livelier style than in my other sacred compositions: I understood that the subject demanded it.

As only a couple of the motets have any obvious liturgical use, questions arise. Were they intended to be performed as a set? Were they meant to be performed at all? Most likely the first performers were a select group of Palestrina’s colleagues, adult male singers of the papal choirs, in a recreational setting. However, those who could afford to purchase the part books would have been wealthy, cultivated amateurs. While The Song of Songs does present challenges, the writing is not too virtuosic for the ladies and gentlemen in such circles, who gathered privately to sing and who, contrary to Palestrina’s high-minded intentions, may have relished the music more as a celebration of romantic love than as an allegory of sacred love.

Tonight’s performance offers a glimpse of such a cultured evening pastime in the Renaissance world. We have selected 16 of these “lively” motets, letting them flow from one to the next in pairs and triples to tell the love story of a bride and groom, whether they be the human soul and its Savior or the beautiful Shulamite and King Solomon.

Einojuhani Rautavaara, writing in a wide variety of styles and genres, has risen to become the most important and internationally renowned Finnish composer alive today. While opera has been a major focus of his work, he has also written a considerable body of symphonies, concertos, chamber music, solo instrumental works, art songs, and choral music.

He first studied composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and later in America with Aaron Copland and Vincent Persichetti, among others. Rautavaara began his career writing in a neo-classical style and achieved his first breakthrough in 1953 with A Requiem in Our Time, now a classic in Finnish brass band repertoire. After experimenting for a while with twelve-tone serialism, he turned to a tonal, neo-Romantic style featuring a more traditional idiom and sonorous textures in which triads, freely combined or even superimposed, became an important element.

It is in this more Romantic vein that Rautavaara composed Vigilia, or All-Night Vigil, comprising settings of 34 texts from the Orthodox liturgy for Vespers and Matins. We perform the Vespers portion tonight. The Helsinki Festival and the Orthodox Church in Finland jointly commissioned the Vigil in 1970, and as the Orthodox are a small minority in Finland, this was the first time the Finnish texts had been set to music. The composer, whose ancestry is Lutheran, not Orthodox, wrote in the preface to the score:

Vigilia ultimately stems from a vision-inducing childhood visit to the island monastery of Valamo in the middle of Lake Ladoga just before the Winter War in 1939; after that war Valamo no longer belonged to Finland. It seemed to me that the islands floated on air, and more and more colorful domes and towers appeared between the trees. The bells began to ring, the low tolling booms and the shrill tintinnabulation; the world was full of sound and color. Then came the black-bearded monks in their robes, the high-vaulted churches, and the saints, kings, and angels in the icons. These images dazzled my ten-year-old mind and lodged in my subconscious, to re-emerge fifteen years later in the piano cycle Icons and again three decades later when I was commissioned to set the Orthodox divine service, or All-Night Vigil. The archaic, darkly decorative and somehow merrily melancholy holy texts affected me deeply. By coincidence, the date set for the performance was the Festival of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist. The proper texts for that day had amazing passages, naively harsh and mystically profound.

No instruments are used in divine services in the Orthodox church, not even the organ. Because of this, I wanted to use the choir in as varied a way as possible. There are numerous solos, most importantly the basso profondo, but also tenor, soprano, and alto soloists appearing singly and in pairs. The choir not only sings but whispers, too. It sings in clusters and glissandi, a traditional feature of the ancient Byzantine liturgy. There is also a “pedal bass” group that sinks to a subterranean low B-flat. The liturgical recitation features microintervals. And so on. In fact, Vigilia is closer in spirit and in expression to the ancient and lost world of Byzantine chant than to the newer Russian chant, which was not established as the accepted style until the 19th century.

Johann Sebastian Bach, in his time at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, was required to include Latin motets each Sunday at the morning service and at Vespers, but he was content to choose works from the 17th-century repertory. Evidently, he preferred to concentrate his energy on the central musical item of the Lutheran morning service, the cantata. Six authentic motets by Bach do, however, survive today. That all are in German, not Latin, suggests they were composed for use outside the regular liturgy. While some are known to have been written for funerals, Motet 6, Lobet den Herrn, setting the brief Psalm 117, is far too vigorous and jolly to have been intended for such an occasion. It is compact yet expansive, set as a series of contrapuntal points within one long movement, to which is appended an Alleluia in contrasting triple meter. This upbeat whirlwind of a piece brings our program to a joyful conclusion.

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