The Binchois Consort is an English vocal group that performs music of the Renaissance era and earlier. It was founded by Andrew Kirkman, a scholar who specializes in sacred music of the sixteenth century.
The occasion of the group's founding was a planned 1995 performance of Dufay's Mass for St. Anthony of Padua as part of a liturgical Mass held on Saint Anthony's feast day, June 13. Their participation in the Mass was well regarded, leading to Hyperion Records inviting them to record it in 1996.
The same process led to the group re-assembling. They sang Dufay's Mass for Saint James the Greater (Missa Sancti Jacobi) and again recorded their performance for Hyperion, plus other compositions by Dufay.
The second disc was very well received. Gramophone Magazine named it the Recording of the Month for July, 1998, and Diapason, the French classical music magazine, gave it the Diapason d'Or in its September, 1998, issue.
The Binchois Consort's third disc comprised music of Walter Frye and Antoine Busnois and is titled A Marriage of England and Burgundy. The Consort has also recorded further discs of music by Josquin de Pres and Dufay. In the autumn of 1999, it made its first American tour, to the New York area, presenting a program called "Josquin and Company." At the same time, Kirkman had become an assistant professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
The Binchois Consort is easily confused with the Ensemble Gilles Binchois, a French ensemble founded in 1979, specializing in similar repertory and directed by Dominique Vellard of the Center for Medieval Music in Paris. Both groups are named after Gilles de Bins Binchois, considered one of the three most influential composers of the Franco-Flemish school associated with the court of the Duke of Burgundy and composer of the earliest polyphonic setting of the Te Deum known to survive.
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