Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London
Palestrina, arr. Francesco Soriano: Missa Papae Marcelli (for eight voices in double choir)
Interspersed with:
Palestrina: Ave Regina coelorum a 8
Plainchant: Ave Maris Stella
Flor Peeters: Toccata, Fugue et Hymne sur Ave Maris Stella, op.28
Plainchant: Gaudeamus omnes in Domino
Charles Tournemire: ‘Introit’ from L’Orgue mystique, op.57 no.35, ‘In assumptio BMV’
Plainchant: Assumpta est Maria
Tournemire: ‘Offertoire’ from L’Orgue mystique, ‘In assumptio BMV’
Palestrina: Assumpta est Maria a 6
Daniel Greenaway (organ)
Choir of the Chapels Royal, HM Tower of London
Colm Carey (director)
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| Images: Matt Abel-Smith (from another performance by this choir) |
This final concert from the 2026 Spitalfields Festival provided not only an excellent musical experience. It also offered the opportunity to visit one of the Tower of London’s two chapels, St Peter ad Vincula, its current building dating from the 1520s, although others have stood on the same site, perhaps even prior to the Norman Conquest. Many are buried there, including two of Henry VIII’s wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, both executed at the Tower, and his successor-but-one, albeit for nine days, Queen Jane. Thomas Macaulay wrote of the chapel, in his mid-nineteenth-century History of England:
In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little cemetery. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts.
It depends what one means by sadness; if one understands it as something qualitatively different from, say, tragic, as opposed to the latter being an extreme version of the former, then this might, according to taste, have truth in it. At any rate, this royal peculiar is an interesting, unusual, and enduringly strange corner of what is itself now a rather strange complex, more exclusively associated in the popular imagination with imprisonment, execution, and death than its history warrants, so much so that one can readily forget the Tower was for centuries a palace in which English monarchs lived in courtly splendour, eating, drinking, carousing, ruling, praying, and more.
There was nothing especially deathly about this concert, notwithstanding the tombs around us (hardly unusual in church buildings). It was, however, an unusual programme, offering an arraignment for eight voices in double choir of Palestrina’s celebrated Missa Papae Marcelli by one of his pupils, Francesco Soriano. Colm Carey, director of the Choir of the Chapels Royal, HM Tower of London, thought it may have been the first concert performance in this country; at any rate it was a rare opportunity. The twofold legend that the Council of Trent sought to banish polyphony from services and that Palestrina’s mass ‘saved’ it may be little more than that. It has proved a hardy legend though, all the way to Hans Pfitzner’s opera and beyond. The intelligibility of the liturgical text, saviour of polyphony or not, is the crucial thing here—and it certainly endures in Sapiano’s version, all the more so when performed with such excellence as we were treated to here. Palestrina’s mass is written for six voices, with a seventh added for the second movement of the ‘Agnus Dei’, although he employs different combinations of voices throughout. From what I have read – I do not recall having heard any other music by him – Soriano worked basically within the tradition of Palestrina, with whom he studied at St John Lateran, whilst adopting the newer polychoral style, which fits very well with what we heard here.
A rich toned, admirably clear performance kept counterpoint and harmony in admirable balance. The ‘Kyrie’ flowing nicely, with its ‘Christe’ offering contrast and continuation, nicely shaded without fussiness or undue anachronism. Palestrina’s eight-voice Ave Regina coelorum sounded, perhaps, a little ‘purer’—though this may well have been my fancy, owing to what I ‘knew’. At any rate, it offered another complement and contrast, as well as pleasure and edification in its counterpoint. No one could doubt the ‘Tridentine’ intelligibility of the ‘Gloria’, as the liturgy became wordier. It was here that the arrangement revealed certain foretellings of later music, if not quite Monteverdi’s seconda prattica, then a little beyond the primo. Tenor intonation of the plainchant Ave maris stella (which many of course will recognise from Monteverdi) prefaced Daniel Greenaway’s performance of a Toccata, Fugue, et Hymne on that theme by Flor Peeters Greenaway communicated i.ts structure with admirable clarity, not merely for itself, but enabling the music that forms it to come to life. It is a strangely reactionary piece – like much twentieth-century organ music – but its echoes of Hindemith were not without interest.
Hearing the Palestrina-Soriano mass in such a chapel gave rise to some thoughts of correspondence with English music, above all that of Byrd, and perhaps most clearly in the ‘Credo’. To perform it in a chapel such as this would once have been unthinkable, perhaps giving rise to a greater English exceptionalism than was ever warranted. In more purely musical terms, to hear it performed as if in one, variegated breath, form secure and revealing, was a splendid gift. Two pieces from Charles Tournemire’s liturgical L’Orgue mystique, each again preceded by appropriate plainchant, showed a markedly different aspect to the organ in general, the chapel instrument in particular, and its playing. Here, moreover, the composer’s elaboration of plainsong seemed considerably more rooted in the immanent qualities of the material. If, at one point, I could have sworn I heard a recollection of the then new music of Turandot, I suspect it was coincidental or mere fancy: more a reflection of having heard the opera twice in recent succession than anything else. Or perhaps not; I must relisten.
Returning to Palestrina and Soriano, the ‘Sanctus’ did just what it should, singing its praises unhurried, yet flowing. The ‘Benedictus’ likewise boasted a keen sense of inevitable ‘rightness’, culminating in cries of ‘Osanna’ that truly lifted the soul. They in turn led to the spirited ascension of Palestrina’s six-voice motet Assumpta est Maria, which sounded, however sentimental the notion may be, properly Marian—connecting us to the chapel’s earliest, pre-Reformation history as well as to revivals thereafter. Carolling harmonic surprises on the words ‘Maria Virgo’ proved a highlight of programme and performance alike, angels singing from heaven to earth and back again, then building to fine, rounded climaxes. With an ‘Agnus Dei’ of hymnal sincerity, fitting to its place in liturgical and concert frameworks alike, the programme reached a conclusion of estimable beauty.
