This turns out to be an opportune morning to meet with Owain Park, singer in and director of The Gesualdo Six, to find out about their future plans, for in the afternoon they’ll start rehearsing for their next recording for Hyperion, ‘Radiant Dawn’, a collaboration with trumpeter Matilda Lloyd. ‘It’s an unusual scoring because with a lower-voice group the trumpet takes on a completely different role from usual. In general, it’s much higher than everything else and already quite a lot louder,’ Park tells me. ‘We’ve made it work through placement of the trumpet, as well as by choosing the right pieces. We’ve commissioned Richard Barnard and Deborah Pritchard for the project, and I’ve arranged some pieces from the Renaissance, too.’

I catch a bit of the afternoon rehearsal, and I can vouch for the timbral magic created by the combination: Lloyd’s trumpet moves from being a luminous beacon to melding with the voices like syrup. I close my eyes and hear exactly what has beguiled me for the last few days as I’ve prepared for this interview: there are moments when the sonorous mixture of The Gesualdo Six doesn’t sound like human voices singing. There are waves when the six men become a choir of historical brass; then, they swerve into seductively synthy territory. ‘That’s not something that we talk about or aim for,’ says Park, ‘but it’s a very happy circumstance when it happens.’

I ask him whether the group discuss intonation: ‘Yes, a lot. We had an amazing session with former Hilliard Ensemble member Rogers Covey-Crump, and in 10 minutes he just completely turned on its head the way that we thought about things. He got us to sing notes and put them in different places, and suddenly our ears really started to hurt: it was so vibrant. He got us to keep the fifth wide, place that major third low, fourths high, as well – just the stacking of those chords made everything make sense.’ I keep my eye on the clock: Park and I could geek out on the subject of intonation like this all day, but there’s so much else to talk about.

The spectacular fun about interviewing a fellow millennial musician is the wealth of information available online that more or less charts our entire professional careers. In the depths of Park’s website, I find a blog post from March 5, 2014 – what he calls ‘Day 1’. It couldn’t be more simply put: ‘The Gesualdo Six, conducted by Owain, performed Carlo Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday, in Trinity College Chapel.’ I ask Park what he remembers of that day in Cambridge. ‘In detail, not a lot. What I remember more is a feeling and a sense of something beginning. I can’t quantify what that is, but I think it’s been borne out over the last 10 years. Of course, March 5 was the concert, but there were a few days before that when we came together to rehearse. If those hadn’t gone well, we might have done the concert and then just let it go.

‘Cambridge was a very musical city with a very connected choral scene. But there was something about the way that we came together for consort music, in particular for the repertoire that we did, that set it apart from what we were doing elsewhere. I think that there was something about the enthusiasm of the people doing it; there was a chemistry.’

The Gesualdo Six (photography: Ash Mills)

Park did not sing in that first concert. He saw the role of director as an intertwining of conductor and administrator. ‘It all fed into the same thing, which was a kind of leading – whether that was musically from the front or actually not conducting some things and just sitting back and listening.’ As the group continued, Park would sing if there was a particularly low bass part or when they tried seven-part repertoire.

‘When Sam [Mitchell; opposite page, far right] left, in 2023, we didn’t feel like we had to replace him – we just slightly changed how we operated. Now we’ve got six of us in total. Four of the original members are still singing with the group; Josh [Cooter] joined after a couple of years, so he’s been with us for eight years; and Ali [Alasdair Austin] joined recently – so the turnover has been very low, which is great. That’s helped us build friendships and a group focus and energy together over the years.’

Park relishes some things that have changed since the group’s formation. ‘I look back at programmes now and I think some of them were good; but some of them were pretty bad: too long, trying to throw too much in at once, too excited. Audiences let us get away with it because I think they could see that there was something happening and they liked the music – but it wasn’t necessarily coherent.

‘Now every time we perform something I feel as though there is a coherence to it; there’s a message and a story. Our programmes aren’t seasonal. There are lots of programmes that we have, that we keep performing, but we change the music within them. So it’s a little bit more like a restaurant menu that uses different ingredients. It’s still the same restaurant: people come to it, recognise it, and they might have some of their favourite things – but it isn’t always the same in the same order.’

Food has become a not so metaphorical part of the group’s recent commitments to immersive performances directed by Bill Barclay, a former director of music at Shakespeare’s Globe. In Secret Byrd, a historically themed, theatrical concert of illegal Masses sung by worshippers during the Reformation, soup and bread were cooked on site, and the audiences were free to roam among the musicians. The Crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields presented the perfect first location to conjure the sense of the underground – the smuggling of priests and hiddenness of Catholic ritual. ‘There are a lot of visual cues: the things that we’re wearing, the candles, and the setting,’ describes Park. ‘But the music is at the heart of it. It’s recreating something that is historically accurate and informed but in a way that is completely touchable for the 21st-century audience. I mean that literally: they can feel their way across the paper, they can run their hand over a candle and feel like they’ve gone back 400 years, they can eat the bread, taste the wine. There is something about that experience which moves people. It’s pretty magical.’

They’re continuing to tour Secret Byrd, even now, after the quatercentenary of the composer’s death; and beyond that, they’re excited about collaborating with Barclay once again. ‘I can’t give away too much, but there is a project that Bill has on his radar called “The Death of Gesualdo”. There’s an opportunity there to tell a story in a way that is a sensory experience, as opposed to just an aural one.’

Even without the smell of freshly baked bread mingling with the melodies of illegal Masses, The Gesualdo Six have excelled in enticing audiences. Their digital output has attracted a huge following. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Park quickly assessed the situation as one of ‘create or stagnate’ – and create they did. Kicking off their Isolation Creation series was a collaboration with the girl choristers of Truro Cathedral. Although it was recorded at home, the audio was good enough to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Their performance of Coronasolfège for 6 by Héloïse Werner also shot through the digital noise with streaks of hope and humour, as well as a surprisingly earwormy riff. It’s a rhythmic work that uses the timbres of the face – teeth percussively gnashed, cheeks slapped. The digital performance, simultaneously makeshift yet slick, is emblematic of the paradoxes of that period.

‘We got everyone round to my flat, one by one. (At that point we were still doing some kind of social distancing.) We filmed it in my kitchen. Andy [Andrew Leslie Cooper], who was our countertenor at the time, brought over a big black cloth which we hung up on the wall. And then we set up a camera – at this point we had invested in one decent one – and there was just about enough room between the work surface and the kettle to get everyone in shot. We had one light on people’s faces and then we just took it. We did it a few times for each person and then stitched it together, and then we put it out.’

While Park makes it seem so easy, digital work involving the multitracking of voices is not where his heart lies. ‘What it doesn’t offer us is that sense of building the sound together. Everyone is a competent enough singer to do it themselves, but actually the magic of what we do is when everyone is in the same room. That was the challenge of that time, because we couldn’t – we weren’t allowed to do that. You can’t think about intonation in the same way when you’re relying on only your voice.’

Park is more excited by the repertoire that allows for fleshly, resonant connection, so when the group’s countertenor Guy James gallops through the door – sure evidence of the singers’ telepathy (or impeccably planned schedules) – it’s the perfect time to turn to their latest album for Hyperion, ‘Queen of Hearts’. It’s the brainchild of James, who is practically feverish when he describes its various ups and downs.

‘It came out of our “Josquin’s Legacy” project. We realised we had barely scratched the surface when it came to understanding the music. So the idea was not to provide repertoire for just one CD, but to provide a whole pool of stuff that we could explore, build around – looking at the composers around Josquin.’ The new album’s title is inspired by the queenly courts of Europe, the project being an exploration not just of the music written for these courts, but also of how music itself connected these courts. The motet-chansons featured on the album blur theVirgin Mary, regina caelorum, with her terrestrial counterparts Anne of Brittany, Margaret of Austria, Anne Boleyn and Mary Tudor. There are also regretz chansons, sonic emblems of sorrow that flourished in late 15th-century France.

James clearly enjoys browsing dusty archives as much as he relishes his time on the concert stage, and he emphasises how incredible it is that the French court repertory survives in three English sources on our doorstep (Pepys Library MS 1760 at Magdalene College, Cambridge; the ‘Henry VIII Manuscript’ at the British Library, London; and the ‘Anne Boleyn music book’ at London’s Royal College of Music). ‘It allows us to connect the composers, as they’re not printed by someone else – they are handwritten next to each other. There’s also a very clear idea of why they’re next to each other.’ On the album, they’ve tried to mimic this as much as possible. For Park, it’s a fascinating experiment not only in performing old music, but also in engaging in how it ‘lived at that time’.

Alongside the Renaissance love songs, regretz chansons and devotional Marian settings, the programme includes a newly commissioned work by Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade – itself a setting of a 16th-century chanson text inspired by monodic psalm singing as well as early Baroque styles – as well as Park’s own composition that sets a prayer reportedly uttered by peasants in the fields of France as Mary Tudor journeyed to her wedding.

This organic and tender approach towards the repertoire is part and parcel of how their ‘Queen of Hearts’ programme developed in conjunction with other projects with other ensembles, notably their ‘Giosquino: Josquin Desprez in Italia’ recording with Paolo Da Col on Arcana. ‘It had been my dream for the G6 boys and the Odhecaton boys to meet,’ James tells me. ‘Some of them can trace their singing teaching back pretty much as far as Josquin. And they’ve all been singing it since they were tiny, in the same way that we’ve been singing Tallis since we were tiny. So to be able to have a little bit of that connection, even for only one day, was very inspiring.’

Perhaps James’s words capture the recipe of The Gesualdo Six’s success: they function very much like a bunch of ‘boys’ simply having fun together – whether that’s playing cricket, dashing round Bogotá to cram in one more archive, mopping up spilt coffee mid-rehearsal, or singing in the most gleaming intonation.

In addition to its rigorous research and thematic coherence, the album is intensely personal. ‘We knew that Sam, our bass, was going to be leaving, and we were welcoming Ali [countertenor] into the group, so there was an opportunity for us to do some of the works that we had really worked on and loved developing and performed a lot with Sam as well as being able to introduce Ali. It closes with Ego flos campi by Jacobus Clemens non Papa – with all seven of us. It’s a lovely snapshot of the group at that transition point.’ After a moment’s quiet, James adds, ‘It’s achingly beautiful.’

The group’s new album,‘Queen of Hearts’, is released by Hyperion on June 28

This feature originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today