Taverner Consort

The Taverner Choir, Players, and Consort rank among Britain's foremost organizations devoted to early music, yet they have also sustained a notable commitment to contemporary repertoire. Andre Parrott established the ensembles; he had served as musical assistant to Sir Michael Tippett, the prominent English composer whose idiom drew deeply from the polyphonic traditions of the English Renaissance. At Tippett's urging, Parrott assembled a choir to perform Renaissance works at the 1973 Bath Festival and selected the name Taverner to commemorate John Taverner, the significant English Catholic composer active in the first half of the sixteenth century.

The Renaissance figure is occasionally mistaken for the present-day English composer John Tavener, who traces his lineage to a Taverner family whose surname lost an "r" when a prohibitionist forebear rejected its association with tavern-keeping. Tavener has lately expressed disappointment upon learning he is unlikely to be directly descended from the earlier Taverner, contrary to his earlier assumption. The Taverner Choir's repertory encompasses music by both the namesake composer and the near-namesake, which further blurs distinctions between them.

Following the choir's initial success, Parrott created two instrumental ensembles to collaborate with the singers and to pursue his investigations into non-vocal repertory. The Players function essentially as a flexible chamber ensemble, while the Consort operates as a Renaissance or Baroque orchestra. The combined groups have issued more than thirty recordings, almost exclusively of early music and predominantly for EMI labels; most of those EMI releases have since migrated to the Virgin Veritas series. The artists later became exclusive Sony Classics performers.

Parrott continues to serve as director of all three ensembles. Malcolm Bruno holds the post of associate director. Born in the United States and trained at New York University, Bruno moved to London in 1974 to undertake postgraduate study at King's College London, where he completed a doctorate, and to pursue composition at the Royal College of Music. He has occupied the associate directorship since 1986, overseeing program development together with the practical coordination of recording sessions and radio and television projects.