The season of Lent, and the week leading up to Good Friday in particular, has inspired some of sacred music’s finest composition. This meditation through music presents a selection of the Renaissance’s most moving music for Lent by that period’s finest composers, including the first performance in New Zealand of the authentic Sistine Chapel reconstruction of Gregorio Allegri’s famous Miserere mei, Deus. As the sun sets and the light fades, the German chorales from Bach’s St Matthew Passion return between each polyphonic piece as a litany to the life of Christ.