Stile Antico

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problem, to sum up broadly, was not that the music was any less compelling, but that musicians mostly hadn't learned to bring out its key features. A new generation of performers, of which the small British choir Stile Antico offers a sterling example, has taken care of that; Stile Antico recently landed atop both Billboard magazine's and Amazon.com's classical sales charts, and they're beginning to show up in series like that presented by the venerable University Musical Society.

Stile Antico (the words are Italian for "old style" and date back to a seventeenth-century term for Renaissance-style vocal music) has twelve singers, typically using three on each of four voice parts. That was probably close to the size many churches and chapels of the nobility would have used at the time, but it presents stiff challenges in terms of blend and balance. Stile Antico lays into those challenges with startling results; each line seems a shimmering thing. In Ann Arbor they'll be appearing at St. Francis of Assisi Church, perhaps the most complicated space in town acoustically and the one that holds the most promise for generating the stunning effects that unaccompanied singers can produce when they really think about the spaces they're in.