Nine Leaves from the Book of Psalms

A penitential psalm sung in the Sistine Chapel at Tenebrae in Holy Week. The Vatican guarded this music: taking a copy out carried the threat of excommunication, and the soloists' ornamented lines were passed on by ear, from one generation to the next. The fourteen-year-old Mozart heard it in 1770 and wrote it down from memory. Here the work is divided into nine parts which wind around the other psalms: a five-voice choir leads verse by verse, and four soloists answer it from a distance — hence the echo.

Psalm 117 is the shortest in the whole Psalter: two verses, a summons addressed to all the nations. Lassus — a Fleming attached from 1556 to the Bavarian court in Munich, and the author of more than two thousand works — set them for twelve voices in choirs that answer one another: the shortest text of the evening is given its largest forces. After the first part of the Miserere the penitent falls silent, and the whole earth speaks.

A gradual written for Ignaz Traumihler, choirmaster of the abbey of St Florian — the abbey in whose crypt, beneath the organ, Bruckner later asked to be buried. The composer set himself a rule as strict as the law the psalm speaks of: not one sharp, not one flat, no seventh chords, everything in the pure Lydian mode. He boasted of it to Traumihler in a letter. After the second part of the Miserere, in which the penitent acknowledges his fault, comes the portrait of a righteous man.

Psalm 119 is the longest in the Psalter: a hundred and seventy-six verses about the Law of God. Stanford takes one of them, the first. The motet was written for the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, where the composer was organist, and appeared in 1905 in a set of three Latin motets. Six voices divide into two groups of three which hand the same phrase to one another; the way the psalm speaks of can be heard here.

The best known of Bach's motets, written in Leipzig. Two four-voice choirs pass the verses of the psalm between them like a ball; the composer weaves together Psalm 149, a Lutheran chorale and verses of Psalm 150. It is the most joyful and the most difficult link of the evening, set exactly opposite the penitence of the Miserere. When Mozart heard this motet at St Thomas's in Leipzig in 1789 he is said to have exclaimed: “Now here at last is something one can learn from”, and asked for the parts to be laid out for him.

Gibbons, organist of the Chapel Royal, wrote this anthem for eight voices in 1622 as his doctoral exercise for Oxford; the text comes from Coverdale's psalter, the psalter of the English Prayer Book. Psalm 47 seats God on a throne amid shouting and trumpets, and the choir breaks into eight voices so that the crowd can be heard.

Rossi was a Jew at the Gonzaga court in Mantua; the duke released him from the obligation to wear the yellow badge the others had to wear. In the collection “Ha-shirim asher li-Shlomo” (Venice) he was the first to apply Renaissance polyphony to Hebrew liturgical texts; the preface, defending part-singing in the synagogue, was written for him by Rabbi Leon of Modena. Here, in a programme built from psalms in Latin, German and English, their original language returns.

From the collection “Psalmen Davids” (Dresden, 1619), the first great work Schütz wrote after returning from Venice, where he had studied with Giovanni Gabrieli. He brought polychoral writing back with him and applied it to Luther's German psalter. Schütz was born exactly a hundred years before Bach; in this programme both their psalms sound in German and for two choirs, and the century between them can be heard.

A motet for six voices published in Giulio Cesare Bianchi's Milanese collection. The text is woven from two psalms — verses of 98 interlacing with a verse of 96 — and the summons it opens with had already been heard that evening, in Bach: O sing unto the Lord a new song. The ensemble closed the programme of “Contemplation of the Incarnation”, the concert the cycle began with, using this same motet; here it is the last word of praise before the ninth part of the Miserere.