Stile Antico sounds like success
The acclaimed early-music chorus Stile Antico was formed in 2001 while its members were music students at various British universities. They came together for a week each year to rehearse and perform music that they were especially enthusiastic about. Gradually, says Oliver Hunt, one of the group's basses, "we realized that we seemed to be quite good at it."
That, one suspects, is a bit of typically British understatement. Only four years after winning an early-music competition in York, Stile Antico has established itself as one of the finest groups of its kind. Having forged a robust career in the United Kingdom, the ensemble takes another step forward tonight, as it makes its US debut as part of the Boston Early Music Festival.
Unusual for a chamber chorus, its 12 singers perform without a conductor. And in an age where recording contracts are a pipe dream for many groups, Stile Antico has released three highly acclaimed CDs for the Harmonia Mundi label in as many years. The latest, "Song of Songs," presents a surprisingly wide array of approaches to one of the Bible's most enigmatic and suggestive texts.
In a way, the group brings together the virtues of distinct musical worlds, the polished execution of professionals with the passion and enthusiasm of amateurs. "I think the fact that we set it up as a group of friends has in many ways been responsible for its success," says Hunt by phone. "If we'd set it up as a business venture, we wouldn't have been able to put in all the hours of work with no pay for the first few years."
Part of Stile Antico's distinctiveness comes from an ensemble sound that's at once warm and precise. In polyphonic works each line has its own color, even when textures are dense. Hunt attributes the sound to long hours of rehearsal and study, so that by the time the group records a piece, "we know pretty much everybody else's part as well as we know our own. And we make sure, when we're singing, that we're always listening to the most important part and not competing with them."
But it is the chorus's highly expressive interpretations, the way its performances delve into the texts' emotional content, that have won it the most plaudits.
"It's been very common for groups just to seek clarity in their interpretation of this music," Hunt explains, "presenting the music as a work of art in itself. Whereas what we've tried to do is to go back to the text itself, and that's our starting point for the interpretation of the piece. So we look at the words, we look at the emotion in the words, we look at what the emotion of the words might have meant to the composer." As an example he cites the Catholic motets of William Byrd, where "there's this incredibly personal emotion and invocation of what Catholics were suffering at the time."
The group already has had the chance to perform in front of large and diverse audiences, thanks to a series of appearances with Sting. The Police frontman recorded an album of lute songs by John Dowland in 2006 and was looking for what Hunt calls "classical backup singers" for concerts. Stile Antico was recommended and has now toured twice with him; during recent concerts, the group sang not only on some of the Dowland selections but on an extended encore of arrangements of some of Sting's best-known songs.
This has overtones of cheesy crossover, but Hunt says that he loves singing the Sting songs, because they're so different from the rest of the ensemble's output. "There's something about 'Every Breath You Take' to 4,000 people who are waving lights in an enormous concert hall that really tingles up the spine," he says.
At Emmanuel Church, 617-868-2363, www.bemf.org
