Ensemble L'Isola - Sudden Passions

Church of St John the Baptist

Vicarage Lane, HG5 9AE, Knaresborough, England, United Kingdom

Ensemble L'Isola

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L’Isola [Lee-so-lah] is not a choir; it consists of 4-6 soloists. Consort singing, one to a part, is exposed and technically demanding. We strive not for ‘blend’ but for unity of sound, enriched by individual colour in a “creative democracy” which favours real-time artistic decision-making over predefined rules. The group hope you will experience the difference through sound: raw, organic, unfiltered, immersive.Directed by Matthew Alec Gouldstone, L’Isola is also an incubator for the cream of young vocal talent emerging from the University of Cambridge and its world-class chapel choirs. The finest voices are hand-picked from within these institutions and then exposed to cutting-edge research and the highest standards of performance practise to equip them for careers within Early Music. During this process, members of L’Isola are trained to read fluently from original manuscripts and performances represent this methodology.In an academic context, L’Isola functions as a specialist performance arm of the early music research and development lab at the University of Cambridge (Cambridge Early Music Consort) directed by Matthew Gouldstone and Edward Wickham. L’Isola also works in close partnership with CIRS (Cambridge Institute for Renaissance Studies) and the Journal of 16th Century Music in addition to various other arts and education establishments. L’Isola therefore brings to audiences the fruits of Cambridge’s pioneering scholarship on music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, providing a new understanding about the way music was written and performed.