Theatre of Voices stands among the most respected and adaptable vocal groups to emerge toward the close of the twentieth century. Under the direction of its founder Paul Hillier, the ensemble has explored an extensive range of repertoire spanning medieval chant, Renaissance compositions by Lassus and Tallis, familiar Christmas carols, and twentieth-century pieces from composers such as Pärt and Cage. Its discography is extensive, appearing most frequently on the Harmonia Mundi and Dacapo imprints, while its roster has fluctuated between a single singer and nearly two dozen across the years.
Its inaugural public performance took place in June 1992 at the Berkeley Early Music Festival. Earlier, in 1989, Hillier had already staged programs of contemporary music under the Theatre of Voices designation while still directing the Hilliard Ensemble. The ensemble’s origins trace to 1990, when Hillier accepted a teaching post at the University of California; its configuration was not fully established, however, until the 1992 debut. The group later transferred its headquarters to Bloomington, Indiana, following Hillier’s appointment to the faculty of the Indiana University School of Music (Early Music Institute). When Hillier relocated to Copenhagen in 2003, the ensemble broadened its international scope accordingly.
Its debut recording, William Byrd: Motets & Mass for Four Voices, appeared in 1994 on Harmonia Mundi. By that point the ensemble maintained a demanding itinerary, performing over the subsequent decade at prominent halls across the Americas and Europe, among them venues in New York, Paris, and Berlin. It featured in a six-part nationally syndicated radio series, Millennium of Music, and on the program St. Paul Sunday Morning. In 1997 Oxford University Press released Hillier’s monograph Arvo Pärt. That same year he directed Theatre of Voices in a Harmonia Mundi album of Pärt’s sacred music, De Profundis, which reached Billboard’s Top Ten. A further widely received collection of the composer’s works, I Am the True Vine, followed on the same label in 2000.
The ensemble has sustained an active presence in both live performance and recording into the present century. Its 2006 engagements encompassed a United Kingdom tour and an appearance at Norway’s ILIOS Festival, where it presented Stockhausen’s Stimmung along with additional works; that year also saw the release of Cantigas on Harmonia Mundi. The world-premiere recording of David Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion earned a Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance in 2010. Ongoing collaborations have included composers Kaija Saariaho, John Luther Adams, and Michael Gordon, among numerous others. In 2019 Theatre of Voices gave the premiere of Gordon’s choral composition A Western. The ensemble appeared again in 2022 on the Deutsche Grammophon release Jóhann Jóhannsson: Drone Mass alongside the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME).
