It was a wonderful way to grow, which we all enjoyed hugely. And we did all emerge with our own different personalities and our own areas to work in. That’s the point—we were all potential soloists. At the absolute peak of the Consort’s activities it never occupied more than 60% or 70% of our time, so people were always doing other things. We had a particularly interesting time with the language, a method of speaking in rhythm as the composer had set the music. We developed that first for Italian texts, but we discovered that it was such a dynamic and liberating thing to do that we started doing it in English and all sorts of polyphonic music as well. It helps you to get away from this necessary structure that the notes and thoughts have gone into. We’re such dutiful musicians that we sometimes think in bars and instinctively lean on the first note of each bar. Polyhonically, without the music you’re trying to get the text across in rhythm. Once or twice when we went into broadcasting studios, people got very excited about this and asked if they could record it! Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire gone mad! But it is one of the good ways in, because it really does underline the fact that although the thought is corporate, five people singing the same words, they are almost always expressing the feelings of one person. That’s the paradox of madrigals. One person’s highly intimate thoughts are shared by five people, but the communion really takes off when each vocal line has its own delivery as a person. We also found that approach incredibly useful for things like Gesualdo. When Gesualdo was “rediscovered” by people like Stravinsky, the music was thought of vertically, moving from one chord to the next. But that’s a very constipated way to sing it—it just doesn’t work. What you actually have to do is be as polyphonic as possible, think each line through individually and only think about the tuning of the chords if the sound is wrong. But if it works that way, following the text and thoughts, it’s the most amazing revelation because every startling chord becomes a special event in a seamless whole which has forward movement. Anthony Rooley’s great contribution was that apart from being a very good director, he was also constantly looking out for interesting music. So when we did Gesualdo we surrounded him with predecessors, contemporaries and successors, many of whom went to further extremes than he did.

In your early days, possibly still to some extent, the quality of your voice was the subject of a wide diversity of opinion...

Oh, yes. There were those who couldn’t bear it!