When chamber choir Bella Voce came into being as His Majestie’s Clerkes forty years ago, it was with the premise of singing a cappella early music in the British choral tradition.
Countertenor and group founder Richard Childress found himself back in Chicago after graduating from St. Olaf College in Minnesota and singing in the Schola Cantorum Cathedralis at Holy Name Cathedral.”There were a bunch of us singing in that choir who also liked early music,” Childress told me in 2016. “One of them was Anne Heider, an alto. So, we got some people together and just sang through some music. We didn’t really have a plan to present any concerts or anything but then we decided, ‘Well, this sounds pretty good. Maybe people would pay money to hear us.'”
Childress asked Heider to co-conduct early on “so we could do more performing: she could conduct, I could sing, and vice-versa.” After Childress left Chicago in the mid-nineties to have a career in England, Heider took over as artistic director.
Paul Hillier
A transformative moment for the group was when Childress was able to persuade celebrated British baritone, choral conductor and Hilliard Ensemble co-founder Paul Hillier to come to Chicago in 1987 to work with them and conduct a few concerts. That began a series of British guest-conductor appearances over the years that would go on to include Sir David Willcocks and Simon Preston.
Hillier, however, would return numerous times and went on to make recordings with His Majestie’s Clerkes throughout the 1990s. He is making a much-anticipated return this month after a long absence to celebrate the group’s fortieth anniversary, and will conduct it for the first time under the name Bella Voce, a name change that occurred in 2001 to reflect a broadened repertoire.
“To be perfectly honest,” says Hillier from his home in Denmark, “it took a while to realize that this was the same group! When I was at University of California, Davis for a few years, one of my teaching assistants there in choral conducting was Kirsten Hedegaard, who is Andrew’s wife.” Hedegaard has been singing with the groups since 1993, Andrew Lewis joined in 1999 and has been Bella Voce’s artistic director since 2004, after Heider stepped down. “There’s been occasional connected letters saying ‘hello’ sort of thing. Then they started to get in touch with me directly—that’s to say Andrew—to talk about coming to conduct them. It took a while for the penny to drop that they were the same group, that Bella Voce had been His Majestie’s Clerkes. I just thought it was another group that had people I knew in it.”
As for why Hillier had not conducted the Clerkes or Voce in so many years, “I just got very busy in Europe with conducting. At one point, I had three choirs in different countries. There wasn’t a lot of space to do other things.”
When Hillier stood in front of His Majestie’s Clerkes for their first rehearsal together, Hillier used his own singing voice to communicate what he wanted people to do in a way that was quite unique. Here was this internationally known vocalist who could use his voice to guide people, even when it wasn’t his voice type. Is that something that has remained or is Hillier’s rehearsal technique become less of a demonstration over the years?
“It has remained a little bit, but I try not to overdo it, partly because I cannot sing as easily as I used to. But there are some things that you really cannot explain in words. If I do sing it, you get your point across immediately. Some of the things you can show without overdoing it are the particular kind of expression or color, but also phrasing, the shape of a phrase and also, intonation. Often people think they’re in tune but somehow—nicely—you have to show them that they’re not. If they can hear it, maybe they can stay in tune.”
The Clerkes were still fairly new at that point and those initial Hillier concerts were landmark in terms of offering the group new possibilities.
“They were very nice to work with and we also did a certain amount of American music, William Billings and that kind of stuff. That was a meeting for us because some of the people in the choir were already familiar with that repertoire and could really sing it very well. I remember that and I enjoyed it very much. I had discovered that repertoire for myself back in England around 1986 or eighty-seven because one of the choirs I had put together had recorded a BBC program of early American music like that. It was totally unknown in England in those days. It’s still not very well-known. There are strong connections to psalmody singing in England but it took on more of a significance in the States than it had ever had in England.”
The fact that the Clerkes were an American group able to sing early American music is part of what inspired Hillier to record some of that repertoire with them for some albums on the Harmonia Mundi label.
“There were quite a few people who were very experienced in singing it and they led the way and were an example of the kind of sound we needed.”
Composer Arvo Pärt (left) and Paul Hillier/Photo: Michael Putland
The most memorable concert Hillier led with the Clerkes was the March 1990 North American premiere of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s “Passio,” a setting of the St. John Passion. The Clerkes joined forces with Hillier’s own Hilliard Ensemble as the soloists with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The Clerkes would go on to record some music of Pärt, and not surprisingly Hillier, long associated with Pärt’s music and his biographer, will be conducting some music of Pärt on the Bella Voce program.
“The pieces on this program are all pieces that I’ve been performing often over the past three or four years and they’re favorites of mine. I put them into an order that I think will be quite interesting. The early music in the first half of the program is really early music: thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth century. And then there are three women composers: Caroline Shaw, Julia Wolfe, well-known in America, and Anna Þorvaldsdóttir, who is Icelandic. Her career is growing rapidly. And in the second, I’ve just got two composers: Victoria and Pärt. I’m doing three of my favorite motets by Victoria and then some of the later pieces by Pärt that may not be quite as well-known to people. Nice pieces, very good pieces. He’s slowed down in the amount of new compositions that he’s been doing. He’s still doing it but just at a slower rate. The pieces in this program are relatively recent, up to ten years old.”
What was it about Pärt’s music that originally attracted Hillier?
“It was a sense that I recognized it. As if I knew it already. I don’t think that was only the early music connection but obviously, it has something to do with it. There was something about the sound which simply felt like something I already knew. Or, if I didn’t know it, without realizing it, I’d been looking for something like this. It just seemed to be exactly what I wanted to start performing as soon as I saw it and heard a little bit of it. And it continued like that. For me, it all started around 1984 to 1985.
“And then I committed the group, the Hilliards, to doing some of it, and the BBC recorded a program, and Arvo was there. And then we got asked to do ‘Passio.’ At that time I said, ‘Well, I’m just forming a choir. Maybe I need another year or two to work with them.’ ‘Oh well, we’ll have to get someone else then.’ ‘Well, just a minute now, I’ll do it.’ We didn’t want to see that opportunity go. But then, from that point on, we were doing it a lot. It didn’t take long to get into that stream. Once we found ourselves in it, it was very hard—even if we had wanted to, which we didn’t!—to get out of doing it because everybody was asking for it. It really suited our voices. And I think that when Arvo came to hear us do it, it was the first time that he felt that he was hearing it being sung the way he wanted it. It was natural for us to sing it in a certain way and it was the way that he wanted to hear it. So it all clicked together.”
As for coming back to Chicago after such a long absence, Hillier is eager to return. “I really do like Chicago. I’ve enjoyed myself there every time I go. It struck me as what a big modern city should look like and feel like rather than some of those that are just way over the top. I consider it a place I would like to be not just because I have been there, but because I actually like it.”
Hillier conducts Bella Voce on March 18 at Old St. Patrick’s Church, and again on March 19 at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston.
Dennis Polkow is an award-winning veteran journalist, critic, author, broadcaster and educator. He made his stage debut at age five, was a child art prodigy and began playing keyboards in clubs at the age of fourteen. He holds degrees in music theory, composition, religious studies and philosophy from DePaul University in Chicago. Polkow spent his early years performing and recording in rock and jazz bands while concertizing as a classical pianist, organist and harpsichordist and composing, arranging and producing for other artists. As a scholar, Polkow has published and lectured extensively and taught at several colleges and universities in various departments. As an actor, narrator and consultant, Polkow has been involved with numerous films, plays, broadcasts and documentaries. As a journalist, Polkow helped co-create the experiential Chicago Musicale and Spotlight, the award-winning tabloid arts and entertainment section of the Press Publications chain of newspapers, which he later edited. He also created and ran the nationally recognized journalism program at Oakton College and was faculty advisor to its award-winning student newspaper; many former students went on to major media careers, including Channel Awesome’s the Nostalgia Critic. Polkow’s research, interviews, features, reviews and commentaries have appeared across national and international media and he has corresponded from the Middle East, Asia and Africa for the Chicago Tribune. Contact: dpolkow25@aol.com
