Formed in 1988 by the Early Music Centre of Great Britain, the Orlando Consort is established as one of Europe’s most important vocal ensembles. Their work successfully combines captivating entertainment and fresh scholarly insight: the unique imagination and originality of their programming together with their superb vocal skills has marked the Consort out as the outstanding leaders of their field. In recent times the Consort has also attracted praise for their highly imaginative programming of contemporary music and jazz, and for their outstanding education projects that are specifically designed to involve amateur musicians of all ages (from 9 upwards) and abilities.
Their impressive discography for Saydisc, Metronome, Linn, Deutsche Grammophon and Harmonia Mundi USA includes a collection of music by John Dunstaple and ‘The Call of the Phoenix’, which were selected as Early Music CDs of the Year by Gramophone Magazine in 1996 and 2003 respectively; their CDs of music by Compère, Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin, ‘Popes and Anti-Popes’, ‘Saracen and Dove’ and ‘Passion’ have also all been short-listed. Their 2008 release of Machaut’s ‘Messe de Notre Dame’ and ‘Scattered Rhymes’, an outstanding new work by the young British composer Tarik O’Regan and featuring the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, was short-listed for a BBC Music Magazine Award. They have recently begun a new long-term project to record all the polyphonic songs of Guillaume de Machaut with Hyperion Records and the first CD in this series was selected by the New York Times as one of the Top 10 classical recordings of 2013.