Cardoso was heavily influenced by the formal, restrained manner of Palestrina, but it is wrong to imagine that the results he achieves are anything but his own. Cardoso's harmonic palette, which touches on the baroque, and his impeccable fluency add up to an experience that might be better compared to Gesualdo's sacred music than Palestrina's. He applies technical devices that were already a century old by his time, but uses them in a highly varied and startlingly free way.

What really remains of Palestrina is the overall sense of a powerful, clear, patient intelligence ordering the music and the emotional impact is great. If Palestrina's work recalls the cool sophistication of Botticelli, then Cardoso's, like Gesualdo's, is more akin to the paranormal intensity of Carravagio. Incidentally, the painter lived and died entirely within Cardoso's life span: perhaps they share the glory of having made some of the last great contributions to Renaissance art, having so expanded its expressive possibilities just as it gave way before the baroque. A tension arises within the music which is, on one level, behaving like music of a much earlier period, and on another, striving towards a vocabulary that had not yet been invented.

The first notes of the piece are unremarkable, being almost pedantically old-fashioned, but as he brings in each of the polyphonic strands, it starts to take on a startling fugue-like manner. The first point is quickly reintroduced, in inversion, and used to accompany itself, creating an uncanny mirror effect that is enriched by the introduction of a countersubject. Once he has worked this all out—over the course of about 20 bars—he turns to a less formal, through-composed style, then moves into an inspired canonic sequence on "dat tibi gloriam," and finally into a tremendous pile-up of suspensions, which is the climax of the whole piece. It can bring a person to tears.

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