The major performer of the festival

The Hilliard Ensemble (UK)

Monday, 27 August 2007, 7 pm
Vác, Dominican Church (“Fehérek temploma” — 22 Március 15. tér [Main Square])

Ticket price: 3500 HUF » Tickets

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Members of the ensemble

• David James — counter-tenor
• Rogers Covey-Crump — tenor
• Steven Harrold — tenor
• Gordon Jones — baritone

The major performer of our festival is The Hilliard Ensemble, which is one of the world’s greatest vocal groups. Their outstanding activity in the areas of both early and contemporary music has made them famous all over the world. They give hundreds of concerts a year in Southern and Western European countries, Poland, Japan and the United States.

The ensemble became famous in the 1980s as an early music ensemble when EMI Records made successful recordings with them. However, they had turned to contemporary music with great interest right from the beginning. Their 1988 recording of Arvo Pärt’s Passio began a fruitful relationship with both Pärt and the Munich-based ECM Records, the former one of the world’s greatest contemporary composers and the latter one of the largest records companies. Since then, they have regularly performed works by Arvo Pärt and other Baltic composers both on recordings and on their concerts. In 1994 they invited composers to write pieces for them and a lot of the hundreds of works sent in for the competition have been included in their repertoire. In addition, they made a double CD with ECM, called A Hilliard Songbook.

In 1994, together with Jan Garbarek, the Norwegian saxophone player, they released “one of the biggest crossover hits of the ‘90s”, the Officium. Their following common production was Mnemosyne, with which they toured all round Europe. Jan Garbarek improvises saxophone music for the beautiful ancient, medieval, renaissance and contemporary pieces interpreted by the Hilliard Ensemble. These CDs cover 5000 years of history of music.

Since the end of the ‘80s, ECM published 20 solo CDs with them together with many other recordings with other records companies (Virgin Classics, EMI, Harmonia Mundi, Coro etc.) and recordings where they also participated. They have been involved in some soundtracks of films, too.

Programme