De Profundis

It has long been known that the choirs of continental churches and chapels in the 16th and 17th centuries were entirely male ensembles where the top line was taken by falsettists or boys or both. The next line down was sung by high tenors. As a consequence the music was sung at a lower pitch than we are used to today. In founding the group Mark too... k these historical choirs as his model. It was his hope that singing polyphony at the lower pitch and using the all-adult-male scoring that the composer would have expected would achieve a sound that was closer to what was intended than what is usually offered by performing groups today. There are no other semi-professional or professional choirs that exclusively perform this repertoire and perform it in this way, and certainly none that uses amateurs in its ranks. As the distinguished musicologist Hugh Keyte has stated, "De Profundis is a choir that needed to be founded. The members of the choir are hand-picked and include some of the finest amateur and professional singers in the South-East of England. Another distinguishing feature of how the group works is that they do not have a fixed musical director, but instead bring in expert conductors for specific projects. They limit themselves entirely to the finest early music conductors in the world. Past and future directors include Andrew Parrott, Andrew Carwood, David Skinner, Robert Hollingworth and Eamonn Dougan. In 2014 the group performed and recorded the complete salvageable works of Bernardino de Ribera (maestro at vila cathedral and early teacher of Toms Luis de Victoria). The disc was released the following year on Hyperion Records. The group later took their Ribera programme to the El Greco Music Festival in Toledo. The group's second CD, sacred music by Sebastin de Vivanco, was released on Hyperion in 2018. It was highly praised in Gramophone magazine and on BBC Radio 3's Record Review programme. It was awarded 5 stars by Diapason, France's leading classical music journal, and was one of the Discs of the ...Read More