Building ‘Sacred Bridges’ to link musical cultures

England’s King’s Singers and international early music ensemble Sarband will combine forces in a “Sacred Bridges” concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday.

When they do, fans of each group may not get what they expect, “but we’re still going to blow their socks off,” says King’s Singers tenor Paul Phoenix, speaking by phone from London.

The UCLA program will be based on “Sacred Bridges,” a CD the groups recently recorded together. It will feature the Psalms of David in musical settings by 17th century Christian composers Jan Pieterzoon Sweelink and Claude Goudimel; Jewish composer Salamone Rossi Hebreo; and Ali Ufki (Woijciech Bobowski), a Polish church musician who converted to Islam after being enslaved as a sultan’s court musician in the 17th century.

Germany-based Sarband comprises artists from Iran, Germany, Italy, France, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey, Lebanon and the United States. It was founded by Vladimir Ivanoff in 1986 to explore the connections linking European, Islamic and Jewish music cultures.

The King’s Singers, formed in 1968 by choral scholars from King’s College at Cambridge University, is known worldwide for the purity and resonance of its six-part a cappella sound -- with a signature combination of two countertenors, one tenor, two baritones and one bass -- and its varied classical repertoire and collaborations with contemporary artists, composers and arrangers.

As the groups perform together, Phoenix said, Sarband’s singers and instrumentalists will improvise on the King’s Singers’ a cappella melodies in juxtaposed sections.

Although well used to madrigals, motets and sacred music, Phoenix and his British colleagues were given “very, very involved language coaching” to sing in Hebrew and Turkish “in a completely authentic way,” he said.

Singing a motet in Hebrew rather than Latin “was a strange sensation but really fulfilling.”

Phoenix said he would love to take the “Sacred Bridges” concert to the Middle East to demonstrate “that the bridges between faiths have existed for centuries through music.”

“It might just get people to think about the world in a slightly different way,” he added.