In the spirit of doing different, vocal quartet the Hilliard Ensemble named itself 40 years ago after the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, painter of exquisite, finely detailed, passport-sized portraits of wealthy clients, courtiers and nobles. The Tallis Scholars, founded the same year (1973), went for a composer tribute, while the King’s Singers had snaffled the obvious (where we come from and what we do) five years earlier. The Hilliards were different from the start.“You can paint yourself into a corner, naming yourself after a composer,” says founder member David James when we meet at his Islington home, “but a name from a different discipline …”  Freed from repertoire constraints, the group stated a commitment from the start to per