Palm Sunday 2025

Today is Palm Sunday. With Tomás Luis de Victoria's Tenebrae Responsories (his so-called Darkness Responses) and more specifically the Aestimatus sum (literally 'be appreciated') in the Holy Saturday morning hymns sung by the Westminster Cathedral Choir conducted by George Malcolm in 1960 we enter this Holy Week. The priest de Victoria remains the most famous composer from the Spanish Renaissance despite the fact that his oeuvre consists almost exclusively of sacred and polyphonic vocal music on Latin texts. Kenneth Clark abhorred the megalomania of Versailles and Rome (see the comments of Stephen Fry on YouTube), and he wanted to avoid this as much as possible. In addition, Spain was still under Franco's dictatorial regime while recording his own masterwork the tv-series Civilization in 1968 and he did not really want to enter that country on principle. However, the fact that he had no interest at all in the culture of the Iberian Peninsula is certainly refuted by this piece of music towards the end of Civilization[media=https://youtu.be/U96EaeevtiY]