Sudden Passions 2025

L’Isola [Lee-so-lah] is not a choir; it consists of 4-6 soloists. Consort singing, one to a part, is exposed and technically demanding. We strive not for ‘blend’ but for unity of sound, enriched by individual colour in a “creative democracy” which favours real-time artistic decision-making over predefined rules. The group hope you will experience the difference through sound: raw, organic, unfiltered, immersive.Directed by Matthew Alec Gouldstone, L’Isola is also an incubator for the young vocal talent emerging from the University of Cambridge and its world-class chapel choirs. Exposed to cutting-edge research, members of L’Isola are trained to read fluently from original manuscripts. L’Isola is the specialist performance arm of the early music research and development lab at the University of Cambridge. L’Isola brings to audiences the fruits of Cambridge’s pioneering scholarship on music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, providing a new understanding about the way music was written and performed.