(Nov. 1, 2010) - It was only a year ago that the British vocal group Stile Antico made their American debut at the Boston Early Music Festival, but their mesmerizing blend of vocal purity and earthy warmth fast become favorites amongst fans and critics alike. They've already garnered a Gramophone Award in 2009 for early music, two Grammy nominations, and several Diapason d'Or prizes.
Still for the most part in their twenties, these 13 singers, who met as students at Oxford and Cambridge universities, marry keen intelligence with extraordinarily gorgeous singing. Their latest release for Harmonia Mundi, Puer Natus Est: Music for Advent and Christmas, is centered around a beautifully rich seven-part Christmas mass by Thomas Tallis:
Ariama editor Anastasia Tsioulcas caught up with bass Oliver North just after their latest US jaunt.
AT: How did the members of Stile Antico first meet?
OH: A lot of us sang from early on, while we growing up and then at university, and we began meeting up during holiday breaks to start exploring this music by ourselves. We wanted to investigate this music on our own.
AT: Investigate it in terms of exploring the repertoire, or in terms of developing a different performance style?
OH: We wanted to learn how to interpret the music for ourselves. Our real focus was alternate repertoire, but even more to develop an alternative, conductorless approach.
AT: A lot of attention on you has been focused on the fact that you don't have a leader, and so in that regard you work far more like a chamber ensemble. So how do your rehearsals work, then?
OH: When we're rehearsing, our starting point is the texts. Of course, they're generally in Latin, so our first job is to work out what we think the composers was doing with the texts. And then it's a matter of hard work on matters of tuning and of ensemble. Since we have no conductor, we have to take individual responsibilty for how the performance develops. And I have to say, you feel so alive when you're each ultimately responsible that way. There's also so much room for a lot of spontaneity from perfomance to performance because we're all constantly looking at each other, really deeply listening to each other, and responding to each other. It is very much like chamber music.
AT: Over the past thirty or so years, there's been much greater interest in early music. But I'm sure you still have newcomers to this repertoire at your performances--how do they react to what you're doing?
OH: I think the way we try to interpret all this old music probably makes it more accessible to the audience. It's easy to think of early choral music as simple, pure, and frankly a museum piece. But we try to get under the skin of the music.
AT: So after a string of quite warmly received recordings for Harmonia Mundi, what's next for Stile Antico?
OH: The next recording we're doing is next spring. The idea is not to present grand music like the Tallis--instead, it's domestic music from Tudor times. We're collaborating on this recording with the fantastic group Fretwork, so it's mixed vocal and instrumental pieces. We think there's a quite wonderful range in this repertoire--we see these Tudor composers really exploring emotion in a way that they frequently couldn't in writing church music.
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Ariama asked Oliver Hunt which groups have provided inspiration for Stile Antico.
There are two: first of all, The Tallis Scholars, who are the archetypal British early music ensemble--they really built up the audience for early music. We wouldn't be where we are today without the Tallis. Secondly, we really admire I Fagiolini; they try to bring out the emotion of music in a way we love. If anything, Stile Antico's goal is to marry the purity of The Tallis Scholars with the warmth of I Fagiolini.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
