Lionel Meunier

Scofield: Although you’re an ensemble, Vox Luminis, you actually describe yourselves as “a group of soloists”, that’s different for a choir or chorus typically. What do you mean by that?

Meunier: Actually, we used that very much at the beginning of the group. I actually tend to not use it anymore, and to just call ourselves early music ensemble, but it has a very specific reason. I tried to build a group around singers that were able to sing any solo requested in the music we perform, but that equally loves, if not more, to sing in ensemble. But I have to confess I had not made the research. It was just an intuition of something I wanted to do. Then you just found out that, of course, Joshua Rifkin came with the proof that Bach’s music was performed by a very little amount of singers. Of course, the soloists were singing the Tutti. I like to mention Joshua Rifkin. I know him, and we get along very well, but also because he came with this press conference or something was in 1981, and that’s my year of birth actually.

So, I just always thought this was funny that I then created what we called a soloist ensemble. So, this was just something I wanted to do, performing also a lot of time the music one on a part, or two on a part. And when you are young, and you try to be different that people notice we are different, that’s what we said: Vox Luminis is not a choir, Vox Luminis is an early music soloist’s ensemble. I think by now we could almost take away “the soloists”, not because we got worse, or we cannot sing the solos anymore, just because I think the research now and there is a quite big consensus, and many groups now have the soloist performing in the ensemble.