Il Suono

Il Suono distinguishes itself as one of today's most engaging vocal ensembles through its passionate and dramatic interpretations of late-medieval and renaissance music, its commitment to performing new music, and the potency and originality of its concert programming, in which achingly beautiful polyphony of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rubs shoulders with new pieces composed especially for the group. Past international engagements include concerts for the St Petersburg Choir Festival, in which the group performed Handel's and Purcell's Odes for St Cecilia's day and an a-cappella programme featuring Mundy's large-scale showpiece motet, ‘Ave virgo sanctissima’. These took place respectively in the Winter Palace and the Menshikov Palace of the State Hermitage. More recently Il Suono gave eight concerts including music by Victoria, Ravel, Burrell and Foggitt in an enthusiastically-received tour of northern Spanish churches. In the UK, Il Suono has given performances of Italian madrigals and arias for the Society for Italian Studies in London, as well as concerts of sacred polyphony in Lancaster Cathedral, and other churches in London, Canterbury and further afield. Highlights of these include solo-voice interpretations of Taverner's masterpiece Western Wind mass and Lassus's bizarre and captivating Prophetiae Sibyllarum – settings of poems which tell of prophecies made by the legendary 'sibylls' of antiquity who supposedly foretold the coming and life of Christ.