VOCES8 - Aug 15

VOCES8 boasts men with intensive falsetto training

German music snobs used to call England the ‘land without music’, but clearly they had forgotten about the Renaissance.

In the days when instruments were embryonic and voices reigned supreme, Britain’s choral masterpieces set stratospheric bars for Europe to reach. Good thing, then, that VOCES8 is here to remind us of that.

This month, the British a cappella octet joins the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory Chamber Choir, the Hong Kong Diocesan Boys’ School Choir and others for the National Centre for the Performing Arts’s Chorus Festival, as the wild card in an otherwise predictable deck.

Founded in 2005 by two former Westminster choir boys (Paul and Barnaby Smith), the group’s website is weighted toward jazzy, often specially commissioned arrangements of familiar favourites; however, members have the classically trained vocal chops to sing whatever they want.

Their Beijing programmeis a light-hearted romp through 500 years of European polyphonic (meaning complex harmonies) works, which will no doubt include enough crowd-pleasers to keep summer concertgoers happy.

VOCES8 originally toyed with the idea of becoming seven and a saxophone, but since Robin Bailey (now gone) sang as well as he played, they thought eight singers had a better ring to it.

Unusually, the two female members (Emily Haines and Andrea Haines) are both sopranos; to fill the contralto gaps, VOCES8 uses countertenors (Chris Wardle and Barnaby Smith).

Countertenors are male singers with intensive falsetto training; this recreates a quasi-castrati sound without the life-altering surgery.

‘Particularly in Renaissance European music, countertenors play a prominent role,’ says director of development Clare Stewart. ‘Having two gives us a very different and a specifically English sound.’ That should keep those Germans quiet. Nany Pellegrini

VOCES8 Concert NCPA , 7.30pm. 50-400RMB.