With its rich history of church and court music for voices, the UK has long been home to many of the world’s finest vocal consorts and ensembles, from The Sixteen to the Tallis Scholars. Almost all of them specialise in early music, however; that is, music from roughly the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. When EXAUDI was formed in 2002, by soprano Juliet Fraser and composer and conductor James Weeks (who is now its sole director), it was therefore almost unique in the UK in concentrating on contemporary repertoire.
This is not to say, however, that that British tradition of excellence in early music singing did not have an impact – in fact it defines EXAUDI’s style and sets the group apart from its counterparts in Europe. Both Fraser and Weeks had backgrounds in early music themselves: Fraser as a chorister at Cambridge University, and then in choirs such as Tenebrae and the Monteverdi Choir; Weeks as a chorister at Oxford and an organ scholar at Cambridge. Shortly after Cambridge (where they first met as students), Fraser came up with the idea of forming a vocal ensemble devoted to new music.
As they established EXAUDI’s aesthetic principles, Fraser and Weeks looked to early music groups like for inspiration. Partly out of necessity: because of the wider context of consort singing, most of EXAUDI’s members have come from early music rather than contemporary. Their insight was to turn this into a virtue: there is a particular sound that defines British early music singing, whose emphasis on clarity and accuracy creates space for every voice to be heard as an individual, without distorting the overall ensemble. They were also able to programme old and new works together in ways that recontextualised them both: since 2012 they have been engaged in the EXAUDI Italian Madrigal Book, an ongoing project pairing new commissions with Renaissance madrigals by the likes of Claudio Monteverdi and Carlo Gesualdo. More provocatively, on their recent album Book of Flames and Shadow, works by Weeks and the Renaissance Franco-Flemish composer Jacques Arcadelt melt into one another, like a particularly psychedelic ambient DJ set.
Those fundamentals came to the fore in an electrifying performance of Brian Ferneyhough’s Missa brevis at the 2004 Aldeburgh Festival, described by the Guardian’s Tom Service as ‘one of those performances you know will be etched on your memory forever’. This fearsomely difficult work (with its own idiosyncratic stance towards early choral music) subsequently became something of a calling card, and a BBC recording of the Aldeburgh performance was released in 2018.
From this point, EXAUDI were established as one of the UK’s most accomplished new music ensembles, of any kind. Their repertory is wide-ranging, from Italy to Canada, and from the complexities of Ferneyhough, James Dillon and Aaron Cassidy (whose A Painter of Figures in Rooms they performed as part of the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad) to the no less daunting simplicities of Jürg Frey and Joanna Bailie. Yet it is in composers of the English experimental tradition that they have found their sweet spot, an imagined place midway between John Cage and the sixteenth-century lutenist John Dowland. This focus has led to several recordings of music by Christopher Fox (most recently Trostlieder, released earlier this year), Howard Skempton and Michael Finnissy (notably Tom Fool’s Wooing in 2018, a work that had languished, unperformed, for forty years).
EXAUDI’s performance at hcmf// comes in their twentieth anniversary year. They will be showcasing works from across their range, from the starkly exposed writing of Naomi Pinnock – an inheritor of that humble English tradition – to the precisely microtonal textures of the Canadian Chiyoko Szlavnics: both musics that require superhuman levels of care and attention. Either side of these, works by the Italian Lorenzo Pagliei and Spaniard Mikel Urquiza both tap into the heightened emotional states that once motivated Monteverdi and Gesualdo. In a musical world that often prioritises noise, fuzziness and blurred categories, EXAUDI’s continuing devotion to ancient values of lucidity, precision and control ensure that theirs will be a stand-out concert.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson