Last night’s Hilliard Ensemble concert, in Budapest’s magnificent Vigadó concert hall, was thoroughly different from anything in my concert-going experience. For a start, there’s the line up: a male vocal quartet of one countertenor, two tenor and baritone. And I don’t suppose there are many - if any - ensembles who will, in a single concert, perform music ranging from Gregorian chant to contemporary, from England to Armenia, with many points in between.
These surface facts, however, mask the key thing that made this concert so different: the intent of the programme. Whether they are singing a recent choral composition or chants from a mediaeval hymnal, with just a few exceptions, this is a performance devised to place you in a state of altered consciousness – something akin to the state, no doubt, that those Gregorian monks would have hoped to achieve through meditation and prayer.
The effect is achieved by vocal technique that is both distinctive and impressive. All four voices are extremely pure: the notes are clean and perfectly level, without the slightest hint of vibrato. The dynamic range is very compressed, apart from those delicious moments when a countertenor voice soars above the others. By some combination of innate quality and technical effort, the four voices have very similar timbre: when baritone Gordon Jones sang a solo, it struck me that this sounded exactly like a typical countertenor voice, just in a lower register.
Attack and release on most notes are very gentle, reminding me of the way an electric guitarist will use a swell pedal to make a note rise to full strength out of nothingness, with no discernible breakpoint. So you couldn’t hear much in the way of consonants, and for all but a few numbers, words were unintelligible. But then, I don’t imagine anyone was expecting a Budapest audience to be fully conversant with English, Latin and Armenian, and lyrics or descriptions of individual numbers were conspicuously absent from the programme.
In other words, very little in this concert was allowed to get in the way of its basic intent: to reach directly into your innermost being with sheer purity and beauty of voice.
When I say “very little”, that’s because there were notable exceptions to much of what I’ve written above. For example, the short opening number, Mundus vergens in defectum, and the long closing number, Viderunt omnes, were altogether more upbeat, with marked dance-like rhythms and a much more folky feel - it made me realise how closely interwoven are the two genres of choral music and traditional English folksong.