Underrated Classical Musicians: The Hilliard Ensemble

 How has the world forgotten so quickly about the Hilliard Ensemble. Just fifteen years ago, this was the unquestionable standard bearing bar raiser among early music vocal ensembles. Other groups were good, nobody was this good. The King's Singers have declined over the decades, and let's face it, their pop music excursions were all rather lame, the same goes for Voces8 and Chanticleer and Polyphony. The world of vocal music is frankly paved wall to wall with soft-ass shit that isn't worth anybody's time. If you want to be entertained, don't listen to people do lame a capella in a church, go to a rock club where you can dance your ass off... Among the ones who know well enough to stay serious, there are larger ensembles who are wonderful and truly serious: The Tallis Scholars, Tenebrae, and of course, the Monteverdi Choir. Aside from the government subsidized Northern European 'VERY SERIOUS CHOIRS' like the RIAS Kammerchor, Swedish Radio Choir, and the Norddeutsche Figuralchor, which are their own separate world, and of course the Baltic choirs, which are yet another world of their own. My favorite is either the middle sized "The Sixteen", whose ensemble composition is in the name, or 'Accentus', who will easily get a post of its own at some point because of how incredibly innovative their manner of doing music is. But among the smaller ones, there's really just the Cardinal's Musick, who can go embarrassingly out of tune, there's New York Polyphony, whom I get the sense still has its best days well ahead of it. But back int he day there was the Hilliard Ensemble and their female equivalents, Anonymous 4. They were both ensembles of fearsome musicians, but of the two, Hilliard generally did much more interesting music.

What Hilliard did was miraculous. These must have been the greatest ensemble singers in the world. Again and again, intonation and diction which was generally so perfect that you could hear the overtones. Nobody really knows the stylistic manner in which these pieces were played, the oral tradition's been dead for half a millennium. But the music was played with supreme common sense, interpretations with middle-of-the-road tempi that let us savor the harmonies and the rhythms. No group ever drew us more plausibly into the distant world of the gothic, with its awesome, larger than life spirituality, meant to comfort and simultaneously disturb with music as immense as the divine that we have only begun to understand again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_ihA8tZaUA