Erin Helyard explains, “The famous Miserere with the high Cs—or what some now call the “English” Miserere—is in fact a beautiful error. In the 19th century a music journalist misread a description of Mendelssohn’s, who heard some astonishingly high notes during a performance, and shoe-horned the ornament into the wrong section. But what a beautiful mistake!

I wanted to go back in time to the earliest sources of Allegri’s Miserere — before those amazing high Cs. I hit upon the idea of commissioning award-winning 17th-century ornamentation expert, Australian tenor Jacob Lawrence, to do what was previously thought impossible: put down in notes a version of Miserere that resembles what we know about the ornamented performance practice of Rome in the 1630s. I also wanted to present the version of the Miserere we all know and love too, as a kind of finale that tethers our historical journey with the present.”