Contrapunctus

Coupling powerful interpretations with pathbreaking scholarship, Contrapunctus presents music by the best known composers as well as unfamiliar masterpieces. The group’s repertoire is drawn from England, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal and Germany, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The scholarly facet of the group’s work – including the discovery of long-lost music and reconstructions of original performing contexts – allows audiences to experience the first performances of many works in modern times. Since its foundation in 2010, the group has appeared in the AMUZ Festival in Antwerp, the Utrecht Early Music Festival, the Festival van Vlaanderen in Mechelen and Averbode, the Music Sacra Festival in Maastricht, the Festival de Música Antigua de Úbeda y Baeza in Spain, the Eboræ Musica Festival and Setúbal Festival in Portugal, the concert series at De Bijloke in Ghent, and the Martin Randall Festival of Spanish Music (Seville Cathedral). The ensemble’s first two recordings, Libera nos and In the Midst of Life, were both shortlisted for the Gramophone Early Music Award. As Vocal Consort in Residence at the University of Oxford, the group is a collaborator in the Tudor Partbooks Project, the aim of which is to study the Baldwin partbooks and other sets of Tudor partbooks, to restore the missing voice parts of the repertories they contain, and to broaden public knowledge of this repertory.