No amount of familiarity with the Hilliard Ensemble's well-known recordings can prepare one for the impact of their live presence. This group epitomises that fascinating aspect of the early music scene - performers who are equally at home in early music and new music. Until mid-November the Irish Museum of Modern Art is presenting four concerts by high-ranking musicians and devoted to a mix of old and recent compositions. This "now and then" series has been devised by the violinist Maya Homburger.
The first concert, last Sunday afternoon, was given by four of the Hilliard Ensemble's singers. David James (countertenor), John Potter and Rogers CoveyCrump (tenors), and Gordon Jones (baritone) sang unaccompanied music from medieval and 17th-century Italy and 16th- and 17th-century England, plus five works written recently for this ensemble.
The impeccable pitching and tone in the opening solo of True Beauty by Piers Hellawell (b. 1956) set a standard from which this concert scarcely faltered. It was a pleasure to hear such precise ensemble and tuning in textures as different as the devious Elizabethan chromaticism of Farnaby's Construe My Meaning, the unaffected simplicity of Passacalli de la vita (anonymous, 17th-century Italian) and the scrunching declamatory lines of And I Saw a New Heaven, by the Latvian composer Maija Einfelde (a first performance).
No wonder composers write for this group, an ardent commissioner of new music. Ensemble singing at this level is a high-wire act in which the slightest wobble shows; and there were few of those. Long preparation and experience was hidden by spontaneity, and the singers' latent theatrical panache was exploited to a tee in Barry Guy's (b. 1947) improvisatory Un coup de des. A riveting concert.
Camerata Kilkenny plays at IMMA on October 10th (booking at 01-6129900)
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