In conversation with Robert Hollingworth

I Fagiolini, the vocal ensemble Robert Hollingworth founded at Oxford in 1986, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year with a new recording of Monteverdi's Vespers – and a performance of the same work on their actual birthday, at MRT's Monteverdi in Venice Festival. Lizzie Watson, MRT Artistic Director, finds out more.

LW: When you look back to the start of I Fagiolini, what was your original vision, and how do you feel it's evolved over these 40 years?

RH: At the start there was no vision at all – simply, we were going to do a concert. I'd already run a quartet of school friends for three or four years before university, and we did a lot of busking, which is a brilliant way to learn repertoire fast. By the time I got to Oxford I wanted a mixed-voice group instead, and I had a lot of music I wanted to look into. I'm quite sure the secret of the group's successes, and its failures, is that I've never planned terribly far ahead. The five-year plan depends so much on other people that it's almost pie in the sky. What I liked doing then, and still like doing now, is sharing repertoire with people and saying: this is a brilliant piece, isn't it? Listen to this!

LW: What sets I Fagiolini apart, I think, is combining musical excellence with real playfulness, and often a strong visual concept. Where do those ideas come from?

RH: It starts with trying to think of things from the audience's point of view – I've spent 40 years thinking about how audiences receive music, as opposed to how artists want to perform it. Most of my good ideas are someone else's. The film, The Full Monteverdi was entirely John La Bouchardiere's concept; I just helped bring it to fruition technically. Tallis in Wonderland was mine, and only half an idea, but a nice half idea. People got quite cross about that title – they thought we weren't taking it seriously. In fact it was the opposite: it's easy to have a superficial relationship with a composer like Tallis, responding just to the noise he makes rather than the music itself. My mother always said she liked watching Torvill and Dean because they danced the music, whereas other people just moved while the music happened to be playing. That's what we're trying to do too.

LW: You've mentioned needing people to feel comfortable enough to take risks. Which musical risks do you think are worth taking – and which aren't?

RH: I'd encourage risk in rehearsal, while still chasing something very exact – acoustically pure intonation, a major third sitting precisely where it should, which is nowhere near where a piano puts it. In performance, singers need the confidence that imperfection is fine, because what makes a performance interesting is them. All my singers are handpicked for that reason: Matthew Long's Orfeo will differ from Nicholas Mulroy's Orfeo, and it should, because it carries something of the singer in it. I think audiences respond to that bravery. Traditionally, singers in ensembles aren't encouraged to be very expressive – partly because of a fashion for a particular blended sound – and I think that's a shame.

LW: How do you decide what to record, given it becomes part of the group's legacy?

RH: I'm remarkably unbothered about legacy, but I've nearly always recorded things that hadn't been done before – English music from the early 16th century, then two discs of William Byrd motets, prompted by my old tutor John Milsom asking why everyone records the Byrd masses and ignores the motets. Venetian carnival music from the 1590s. The first recording of Tompkins' 1622 partbooks. More recently, Orazio Benevoli's multi-choir masses – we recorded only the four best of a much larger set, because the rest weren't as strong. There's no point doing something unrecorded if it isn't good. I'm not good at five-year plans, but I am good at telling one piece of music from another.

LW: And the Monteverdi Vespers recording, to mark your anniversary – what's new in how you're approaching it? 

RH: Partly it's a snapshot: here's how we do the Monteverdi now, with colleagues who are real experts in it. But there's also new information about pitch and instruments. There were hundreds of different pitch standards across Italy in this period – sometimes different pitches within the same town – so the idea that anything in the 16th century was fixed or standard is a joke. Bruce Haynes's research on Italian organ pitch has been invaluable there. For our recording, rather than simply performing everything a tone higher to match Monteverdi's written pitch, we're using tuono corista – the period practice of keeping instruments like cornetts and violins at their brilliant higher pitch while transposing certain movements down for the singers, exactly as would have happened at the time. Two movements, the Lauda Jerusalem and the Magnificat, I'm convinced Monteverdi meant a fourth lower than written – the clefs imply it. If you leave them where they sit just because you like them up there, why not treat all music that way?

LW: Do you feel we should be trying to recreate a historically "authentic" listening experience, or is that the wrong ambition?

RH: We're not 16th-century listeners, and we shouldn't pretend to be. We like the idea of something curated and cared for – that's a modern habit, not a period one. Ravi Shankar was delighted, on his first visit to England, that audiences listened to him in total silence, because in India people talked over the music. We shouldn't be too hard on our own traditions. But I do think if you're going to call yourself a historically informed group, you should actually be one – you work with the composer's own material, row downstream with the music rather than against it, and then bring your own musicality to what's left.

LW: Looking back over I Fagiolini's history with MRT, is there a performance that particularly stands out?

RH: Individual years tend to merge into a glorious sunlit churchyard. But I remember specific things – staging Vecchi's L'Anfiparnaso, the masked madrigal comedy, with Simon Callow. And a concert on a hilltop above Florence, in a building somewhere between a church and a folly, right after a thunderstorm: as we opened the doors and started singing, sunlight poured through, and rain was still falling through a hole in the roof into a pool below. What I'd say about touring with Martin Randall specifically is that these are always the least stressful programmes we do abroad, because we're so well looked after – food, water, somewhere to change, even if it's an offering of the Uffizi. That matters enormously. It means we can just do our job.

LW: Is there anywhere you haven't performed yet that you'd love to?

RH: Two places I've only ever visited as a tourist: the Vespers in the Venetian friary where Monteverdi is actually buried, and Orfeo in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Both will be extraordinary and I am very much looking forward to your Monteverdi Festival.