Anyone thinking of renaissance music as arcane, stuffy, or even naive might have been astonished at the Sunday afternoon concert by the superb British choral ensemble Stile Antico.

The ensemble highlighted the dramatic alternation of imitative and declamatory passages, leading to a wonderful melismatic flourish at the close…

The rewards of this outstanding disc are double. On one hand, one is presented with the marvel of High Polyphony performed to perfection. On the other hand, there is a feeling that new doors have been opened.

This selection of motets, mostly for five or six voices, is unexpectedly rich in imagination, variety, and often sheer joyful energy, and the performances boast a high-quality technical brilliance.

Stile Antico brings brilliantly to life this highly varied selection of Wert’s beautiful motets.

This was a perfectly constructed programme, delivered with a real sense of engagement with the ethos of the works performed and the texts set. We didn’t really need an encore of Gibbons’ ‘The Silver Swan’, but who would complain?

Stile Antico brings a fresh, intelligent and collaborative approach to vocal polyphony… John Wilbye’s motet ‘Draw on Sweet Night’ closed this exquisite excursion into (mainly) sixteenth- and seventeenth-century polyphony.

This was a fine and varied concert… by an adventurous ensemble with an insatiable curiosity for music from the past which is outside the mainstream.

Where some ensembles strive for a pure and almost disembodied sound, Stile Antico’s sound is earthy, robust, and very exciting.

Fresh faced, highly trained, and undeniably gifted, the 12 singers employed a straight-tone style that bridged 400 years of vocal repertoire with unflagging urgency and imagination.

In tandem with the fine musicians of the Folger Consort and the Arcadia Viols, Stile Antico turned the church itself into an Arcadia of harmony, counterpoint, and song.

This new CD fully lives up to the supreme blend of voices… a programme that reveals Stile Antico as one of the most fluent, perceptive interpreters of Renaisance polyphony.