Interview, Stile Antico celebrate their tenth birthday

Since winning the Audience Prize at the Early Music Network Young Artists' Competition in 2005, the British singers of Stile Antico have rapidly established themselves as one of the finest early music vocal ensembles around: they are now celebrating their 10th Anniversary. Collectives of ex-Oxbridge choral scholars tend to spring up and then disperse from one academic year to the next, but Stile Antico's immaculate blend, tuning and ensemble (they rehearse and perform without a conductor), imaginative programming and collective musical intelligence quickly marked them out as something very special indeed, and a recording contract with Harmonia Mundi followed directly from their competition success. Since then, they've recorded a disc per year for the label, and won plaudits and awards galore - Song of Songs took the Early Music prize at the 2009 Gramophone Awards, The Phoenix Rising was shortlisted in the same category four years later, and pretty much every disc they've released has netted five-star reviews aplenty.

Early this year I popped down to All Hallows Gospel Oak (where the group were hard at work recording their forthcoming Christmas CD, centring on an elaborate five-part mass by Clemens non Papa) for a chat with soprano Helen Ashby and baritone Will Dawes about Stile's rise and rise over the past decade - and their plans for the next...!

If you were to look back on the Music for Compline disc [their debut CD, released in 2007], is there anything you would do differently?

Will Dawes (WD): "Well, they’d have me on it for a start! I came on board for the second disc, and we’ve done a disc a year so far."

Helen Ashby (HA): "Interesting question, and it’s very difficult to cast my mind back so far! I do think we’ve developed as a group, a lot…Actually in a way we were quite lucky with the repertoire choice because I think this restrained English repertoire suited us pretty well at the time, and it was a good disc to do as a first one. Since then, we have tried to become more ambitious as a group in terms of exploring emotional range and so on. In a way, though, I don’t think all that much has altered – well, certainly haven’t changed much about the way we work!"

WD: "Voices have naturally changed, personnel have changed, and our bodies have changed as well – I can’t speak for myself, but motherhood does things…! Yes, the sound of the group has changed, both through personnel and just through ageing ten years."

HA: "It’s been really interesting to develop individually as well as a group, and it’s quite nice to have a record of that on disc!"

So what have been your personal highlights of the past ten years with Stile?

WD: "The fact that we’ve become regular performers at the Wigmore Hall is really very exciting, and to look back even four/five years ago when we weren’t there, and then get the excitement of an email saying ‘John Gilhooly wants to book you until 2019’ was just … ‘What?! This is amazing!’ It’s now one of our most regular venues: we’ve done 60-odd concerts in the United States, so the overall highlight is that we’ve become so established – the name, what we do – and that makes me feel very humble, actually."

HA: "Another highlight is that we’ve been to some amazing places; we’ve been so lucky in getting to go to countries like Lebanon and Mexico and perform this repertoire in places where they don’t hear that much of this kind of music."

WD: "Just seeing the look on people’s faces when they hear some of this music for the first time is magical…And also, seeing the look on people’s faces when they’ve heard it several times before and perhaps didn’t expect to hear it like this! And of course getting to know lots of new music ourselves: every time we do a programme there’s something which is brand-new to a lot of people."

HA: "Working on the new John McCabe piece ['Woefully arrayed', which featured on the 2012 disc Passion and Resurrection] was wonderful, as he actually came and sat in rehearsals and so all twelve parts were written specifically for each of our voices, which was great as with the Renaissance stuff someone often ends up falling in the cracks!"

WD: "And it was really exciting when we first looked at the score and saw ‘Dedicated to Stile Antico’ – you just felt that you were making a piece your own, and I think we’re still the only people who’ve performed it, which is actually a bit of a shame!"

HA: "I think that’s one of the downsides of it being written for specific voices!"

Who researches your repertoire and plans your programmes? You seem to have a lots of ideas and input from within the group on this side of things...

HA: "We have a music sub-committee – there’s five of us – but anyone in the group can suggest things. Obviously we all sing in various other places, and people often come away from a Sunday-morning church service and say ’Oh, we MUST do this in Stile!’. And then the five of us will tentatively programme a concept."

Aside from the Wigmore, do you perform much in secular venues?

HA: "It’s quite varied – in America, it’s quite often concert-halls, as we do things connected to universities. But we’re more often in church! Sometimes you go into a concert-hall and think ‘Oooh…is there an acoustic in here?!’. The Wigmore, though, is obviously fantastic!"

WD: "And there’s other venues – Spivey Hall near Atlanta is absolutely sublime. It seats about 250/300 people, but there’s a really wonderful acoustic going on there…and occasionally you get buildings which were originally churches but are now deconsecrated, so do you classify that as a secular or a sacred space…?"

HA: "The main benefit of secular venues is that they tend to have heating!"

WD: "And very nice green rooms!"

You mentioned the McCabe commission, which obviously made quite an impact on singers and audience alike - is there more new music in store for you?

WD: "There is! We’re doing a Nico Muhly premiere at the Wigmore Hall at the end of this year, which we’re really looking forward to…"

HA: "And we did also do a piece by Huw Watkins at the Wigmore last year…"

WD: "...‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ – a Shakespeare setting, which I think we might work into a Shakespeare programme, with it being a big Shakespeare year [the 400th centenary of his death] next year! We also had a programme last year called O Radiant Dawn, featuring music by William Byrd and James Macmillan – two defiantly Catholic composers writing in Protestant times, which we’re singing again in Germany in August, and that’s great fun - pairing up identical texts by two composers 400 years apart is really quite exciting."

Other recent recordings by Stile Antico

(You can browse their full available discography here.)