New York Polyphony, a male vocal quartet, has earned acclaim for its singular vocal blend that projects the presence of a far larger group. Its programming reaches back to Gregorian chant and includes performances and recordings of seldom-heard or recently unearthed medieval and Renaissance works, yet the ensemble has placed equal emphasis on commissioning new music.
Formed in 2006, the quartet consists of countertenor Geoffrey Williams, tenor Steven Caldicott Wilson, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert, and bass Craig Phillips. Appearances have taken the group beyond New York and other American cities to such venues as London’s Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Festival Oude Muzike Utrecht, and Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde, where it presented the European premiere of Gregory Brown’s secular Missa Charles Darwin; a recording of that piece appeared in 2017. Domestically, New York Polyphony has collaborated with composers including Richard Rodney Bennett, Jonathan Berger, and Ivan Moody, whose The Vespers Sequence received its first performance at Columbia University in 2017. Broadcast credits encompass the radio program Performance Today and a television appearance on The Martha Stewart Show.
The ensemble’s discography spans the Avie, BIS, and Navona labels. Its initial release, the 2007 Avie collection I Sing the Birth, gathered Christmas music from medieval, Renaissance, and modern sources. The 2012 album EndBeginning, devoted to previously unfamiliar Renaissance polyphony by Crecquillon, Brumel, and Clemens non Papa, was selected by The New Yorker as one of the year’s ten notable classical recordings. Two New York Polyphony albums have received Grammy nominations. For a 2016 account of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli the quartet expanded to seven voices. That same year it commissioned Gregory Spears to compose the new work The Bitter Good, intended for later performance and recording. BIS issued a 2019 recording of Francisco de Peñalos’s Lamentationes, followed in 2021 by And the Sun Darkened: Music for Passiontide.
