Cinquecento

Gold 2022 opens with the best known work in the Lucca Choirbook: the Missa L’homme armé, by Guillaume Dufay. This most famous of all the polyphonists – who was once attached to Bruges’s Sint-Donaaskerk – took a song from the street and used it as the basis of an ingenious Mass. A great innovation at the time. Unsurprisingly, given its musical leaps and powerful rhythms, L’homme armé was later used by several other composers as a solid and familiar cantus firmus for the Latin Mass. Interwoven into a Mass, the ‘armed man’ could be seen as a symbol for Christ, who was coming to protect the Occident from the advancing Ottomans like a knight in shining armour. Dufay went even further by using the song both ‘straight’ and backwards, to symbolise Christ’s arrival and His departure. In this concert, the five excellent singers of Cinquecento set Dufay's monumental Mass – probably the ‘greatest hit’ of the Renaissance – alongside motets by Isaac (a Mass from whom is also included in the Choirbook) and by Bruges-born composer Arnold von Bruck, who was active in several Habsburg courts.