Concordia was founded in 1992 to explore music involving viols of all shapes and sizes. Under the direction of Mark Levy, the group had some notable successes in the late-1990s concentrating on the rich field of English consort music. More recently, however, Concordia has turned increasingly to its wider brief, with numerous projects rediscovering the repertoire of the prestigious ensembles of lutes, viols and voices that had a leading role in all the main European musical centres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Concordia appears regularly at major British music festivals and throughout Europe, as well as at Wigmore Hall, the Purcell Room and Queen Elizabeth Hall, where they played in the first Royal Festival Hall Early Music Festival. Concordia has gained a special reputation for its imaginatively themed programmes, often exploring links with the other arts. As well as the magical English music of the golden age and a wide range of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire from Italy, Spain, Germany and France, Concordia’s innovative progamming has led to performances combining music with newly commissioned dance, poetry and drama, including a set of monologues for Elizabeth I premiered by the actress Penelope Keith at the Covent Garden Festival, which has gone on tour around the country. Other collaborations have included work with Will Kemp of the Adventures in Motion Pictures dance company and the poet Glyn Maxwell, and numerous concert appearances, radio broadcasts and recordings have been linked to major exhibitions at the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts and elsewhere. Concordia’s involvement with the National Gallery’s blockbusting Titian exhibition, for example, led to two recordings and a major UK tour exploring the work of Andrea Gabrieli and his contemporaries.