Biography

Fermata Strings began in a draughty rehearsal room, when four conservatory colleagues opened a volume of Palestrina partbooks and wondered what would happen if nobody sang. The answer — played entirely on strings — was clear enough to build a quartet around.

Ten seasons on, the group has given hundreds of concerts across churches, halls and festivals, earning a reputation for programmes that treat five-hundred-year-old lines as living music rather than museum pieces.

The core repertoire is Renaissance vocal polyphony — masses, motets and madrigals by Palestrina, Victoria, Allegri and their contemporaries — transcribed for string quartet from original partbooks and choirbooks.

Around that core sits a second strand: new music written for the same forces by living composers, commissioned and premiered each season. Old and new share the same stage, and often the same concert, so audiences hear how little the conversation has changed.