Twenty years ago, a group of Oxford undergraduates gave their first concert. They intended to specialise in early music, and so they called themselves I Fagiolini (the little beans), gently mocking the 1980s caricature of early-music enthusiasts as sandal-wearing vegetarians. When they turned professional, the name stuck, and the group has gone from strength to strength, carving its own niche. Though the founder-director Robert Hollingsworth is still the guiding light, the personnel have changed over two decades: singers such as the countertenor Robin Blaze, tenor James Gilchrist and baritone Roderick Williams are all former members, and some of those alumni made guest appearances in this 20th-birthday concert.
I Fagiolini have been so imaginative in weaving theatrical elements into their performances that it was almost disappointing to find this was a relatively strait-laced programme. There were the usual witty, irreverent introductions to each item from Hollingsworth, but otherwise, the soberly dressed singers sang from music stands and behaved respectably. If the intention was to show that the quirkiness and flamboyance have always been underpinned by the highest musical standards, then that was certainly achieved.
In the first half, I Fagiolini moved smoothly from William Byrd's wonderful eight-part motet, Ad Dominum Cum Tribulare, to madrigals from Monteverdi's Third and Fourth Books, via Tomkins, Weelkes and de Wert. Every piece was a model of tight ensemble and perfect intonation.
After the interval came three radically different 20th-century pieces. They ended with Poulenc's Sept Chansons, 1930s settings of poems by Apollinaire and Eluard; it was preceded by Berio's charmingly witty and slick Cries of London, and one of their own commissions. Adrian Williams's Out in the Jungle weaves extracts from a series of letters into a stream-of-consciousness dialogue between two actors (Julian Forsyth and Nigel Richards here) to which the Fagiolini singers add commentary. It's slight but deft and hugely effective, and the performance, like all the others, was irresistibly polished.
