Stile Antico Comes East: A Conversation with Eleanor Harries Clarke

Something long anticipated had finally arrived. After years of wanting to perform in the Far East, Stile Antico—one of the world’s most celebrated Renaissance vocal ensembles—was making its way across the globe, stopping first at Korea’s Busan Choral Festival before arriving in Hong Kong for a landmark debut concert.
Speaking to RTHK Radio 4 from Korea, ensemble member Eleanor Harries Clarke radiated quiet excitement. “We’ve been wanting to perform in the Far East for many years now,” she said, “and it’s never quite come together—but here we are.”
A Legacy Built on the Stages of Europe
The journey to Hong Kong carried considerable weight behind it. Stile Antico had long since earned its place among Europe’s finest ensembles, performing at the Wigmore Hall, the BBC Proms, Buckingham Palace, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. These are not incidental accolades—they represent a sustained artistic reputation built across decades of rigorous, deeply considered performance.
At the Busan Choral Festival, the group performed the opening concert to an extraordinary gathering of choirs from around the world. Clarke recalled the moment with warmth: a choir from Indonesia singing Monteverdi. “It was wonderful to see people all over the world interested in this music,” she said.
History as a Guide, Not a Constraint
Clarke’s path into Renaissance music was, by her own admission, an unexpected one. She studied mathematics, not music history. What drew her deeper into the repertoire was the ensemble’s collaborative working process—learning, as she put it, from how every other member approaches the music.
That collaborative spirit shapes the ensemble’s entire philosophy. Stile Antico researches the historical and textual context of every piece they perform, but they refuse to be imprisoned by it. “We are not a museum,” Clarke said plainly. “We really like to be informed by the history of the music, but we’re not bound by it.”
The result is music that breathes and risks—a performance of the present, shaped by the past.
Beyond Sweetness: The Full Emotional Range
There is a tendency, Clarke acknowledged, to hear Renaissance polyphony as something decorative. Beautiful, yes. Ethereal, certainly. But she is eager to resist that reduction. “Renaissance music isn’t just about a very sweet, beautiful sound—it has so much emotion to it.”
Her example was William Byrd’s Ne irascaris, a work she described as “really quite despairing”—music that speaks of profound anguish, not gentle contemplation. The text drives the feeling; the craft amplifies it. For Clarke, this emotional breadth is precisely what makes the music so compelling to perform live. “It doesn’t have to be something in the background,” she said. “It really can be an emotional performance.”
A Closing Gift: Ego flos campi
The Hong Kong concert was to close with Ego flos campi by Clemens non Papa—and Clarke’s description of the piece was almost a poem in itself. “It’s just so calm and so rich and warm,” she said. “An absolute joy to sing.”
What makes the piece so compelling is its architecture. Each voice enters in turn, weaving into the texture gradually. A central section—the sicut lilium, or “lily” passage—sets the upper voices against the lower, before all voices finally unite. “It’s the way he builds the piece up by using different voices and then joining them all together,” Clarke explained, “which creates this wonderful build from a calm opening to a really warm and rich finish.”
For a Hong Kong audience hearing Stile Antico for the first time, it would be the ideal final word—layered, luminous, and complete.