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On the last decades a lot has been done on researching the performance practices of sacred music from the Renaissance, within its liturgical frame. The proposed paper instead wants to lay its focus on the religious music of the same period, but composed for private usage in palaces, in the scope of what we use to call musica reservata, an expression created as a description exactly for the activities of the composer we want to dwell on: Orlando di Lasso. We know that Orlando di Lasso, besides being a very cultured homme de lettres in several languages, got recognition as a good actor in the commedie dell’arte that used to fill the long winter nights in the Court of Albert V of Baviera. His letters testify such rigor and language acribia, that it shouldn’t surprise us that he became a fundamental reference for the studies on Musica Poetica – pointing out the relationship between music and text – that began to arise short after his death, in 1594, so that even a Lutheran Kantor like Joachim Burmeister, a pioneer on the new science, Bach’s predecessor on the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig, used Lasso’s (Catholic) music as a main source of examples for his Figurae. In his works written for a small ensemble and few privileged listeners (musica reservata), the Word inhabits the centre and is alone the root of any musical invention, daring Lasso, in such contexts, a much stronger rhetoric audacity than in works composed for public celebrations. How can we give the performer a deeper experience on the poetic intensity of the text he is about to sing, in a somehow similar way to the one we imagine that the composer himself experienced, since we know he was an excellent tenor, hired in Munich actually only as a performer? In this paper we present several approaches which try to accomplish this goal, tanking as a departure point the musical practice and notation of the 16th Century, crossed with the needs of a modern performer, providing the singers with means to develop their sensitivity towards the text, as well as clues in order to come to a homogeneous interpretation, in homorhythmic passages, as well as on dense polyphony. In order to make this demonstration real, and not just a row of speculations, we show – using three big cycles by this composer (Lectiones ex propheta Iob, Prophetiae Sibyllarum e Lagrime di San Pietro) – which different strategies were adopted, aiming to move the modern performers towards sensations we imagine that Lasso went through when reading these texts, even before the first note of each piece was written. During the paper such strategies are illustrated showing the materials which were created to address this idea, as well as recordings of some of its artistic outputs. It is a try to find back the origin of the composition in its centripetal force and reason to exist, insofar as the vocal music of this time – at least, for sure in Lasso’s work – doesn’t claim to be in itself an end, but rather a privileged mean of expression and intensification of the Word.