Read on to discover more about The Sixteen, one of Britain's leading chamber choirs, founded by Harry Christophers 45 years ago... and by the way, you can hear The Sixteen perform at the 2024 BBC Proms. They'll be performing works by Stanford, Parry and others for Prom 63, on Saturday 7 September.
The Sixteen celebrates its 45th anniversary...
Good fortune figures in the story of one of Britain’s leading professional chamber choirs. The Sixteen, which made its official debut 45 years ago, welcomed fate’s blessings in lean times and was moved by it to take risks that others might have ducked. Yet its longevity and success owe more to a potent blend of artistic excellence, smart business decisions and what its founder and conductor Harry Christophers describes with a smile as ‘the leap of faith’.
The latter played a decisive role in conceiving CORO, The Sixteen’s own record label, launching its Choral Pilgrimage – an annual series of concerts in British cathedrals, chapels and churches – and developing Genesis Sixteen, its pioneering young artists programme.
Harry Christophers – a most genial conductor
The Sixteen’s greatest good fortune rests in the character of Christophers himself. Tremendously loyal to his musicians, the organisation’s staff and those freelancers who periodically work for it, the present author included, he’s a master of extracting the best from people.
His rehearsal manner is both relaxed and intensely productive, a lesson in how to combine two desirable conditions that others struggle to harness. And it’s delivered with genial English humour, enthusiasm and old-fashioned decency. ‘What I hope we show as a group is that we’re human,’ he notes when we meet in Cambridge. ‘There’s no point in being a conductor of singers if you’re going to feed terror into them!’
Christophers owns a keen ear for the things that he needs to fix in rehearsal and the wisdom to leave his choristers to fix others themselves. While preparing for the launch of this year’s Choral Pilgrimage in the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge, he deftly smoothed rough edges in Lassus’s Magnificat Benedicta es caelorum Regina and Bob Chilcott’s Lauda Jerusalem Dominum, a specially commissioned setting of Psalm 147, with a few words here or a sung phrase there. The pay-off came later with a performance hallmarked by the emotional engagement and commitment of Christophers’s choristers.
Julie Cooper, a Sixteen regular for almost 30 years, is sure that the group’s generosity of spirit flows from its director. ‘Harry is unique among conductors,’ she says. ‘He’s as you see him: a kind, loyal person, and a deep and great friend. I’m really proud of that and of him.’
A family affair
As a soprano in demand on the freelance choral circuit, Cooper is well placed to make comparisons with Christophers’s peers. ‘Some often prefer the “whiter” sound of a younger front soprano line, but Harry now enjoys a warmer sound than when the choir started. That’s great for me. There’s a real identity to The Sixteen and that comes from Harry. He always talks about it being a family and he engenders that feeling. We’re very close. All the girls are in a big WhatsApp group together, the sops Zoomed twice a week during lockdown, and we’re godmothers to each other’s children.’
Cooper and her husband, bass Ben Davies, are one of three married couples in The Sixteen family. The friendship group, she notes, has deepened over the years. ‘Harry loves to be on the stage with us and in the pub after, having a laugh. That’s great, and rare! I absolutely adore him. There are reasons why we do what we do in the current climate, and it’s certainly not for the money! Sometimes we’re working in horrible acoustics or we’re exhausted, or stuff happens in people’s lives. But I look forward to every single gig with The Sixteen. Harry makes the music come alive.’
The legacy of organist Allan Wicks
When we speak outside St John’s chapel before his rehearsal, Christophers recalls key influences on his work – Allan Wicks, organist of Canterbury Cathedral, and Bernard Rose, master of the choristers at Magdalen College, Oxford, among them. ‘Allan was a total maverick, a one-off,’ he notes. ‘His musicality and love of music were incredible. He had this ability to know just how far he could push us choristers and when we needed to let off steam. That’s been my approach, too. I encourage banter in rehearsal – I don’t want people to sit there looking glum. I want them to enjoy themselves. The day that’s lost will be the day I stop. There’s no danger of that with this lot. They take the piss out of me all the time – it’s great!’
Embracing change in the musical world
The Sixteen has grown accustomed to working against a background of often imperceptible, sometimes seismic change. It has weathered the contraction of formerly lucrative touring circuits overseas, embraced transformation of the recording business and found ways to keep the group going during the first year of the Covid pandemic, not least with its online Choral Odyssey series.
Above all, it has proved adept at responding to new opportunities without sacrificing its core artistic values, despite the pressing commercial realities of generating sufficient work. ‘It doesn’t get easier,’ says Christophers. ‘Hires abroad are few and far between at the moment. Costs have risen radically and our good friend Brexit has hindered things a lot. But I have great hopes for the future and for a new [Labour] government. But I don’t expect things to be as they once were.’
Establishing a name in the early years
Those ‘things’ included frequent foreign tours and, during the choir’s first two decades, an industrial-scale output of new recordings. The Sixteen cut their first disc for Meridian in 1980, an album of sublime music from the Eton Choirbook, found an early champion in Ted Perry, founder of Hyperion Records, soon after and went on to record for Chandos, Virgin Classics and the short-lived but productive Collins Classics label. It was an exciting time, initially fuelled by the energy of discovery and rising recognition, the latter confirmed by invitations to perform at the Salzburg Festival, the BBC Proms, Vienna’s Musikverein and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.
The Sixteen arrived in Salzburg just ten years after its first official outing, a concert of works by, among others, Mundy, Purcell, Pelham Humfrey and Schütz, presented on 5 May 1979 in the chapel of Christophers’s alma mater. Choir and conductor gathered the following week at St John’s, Smith Square for their London debut.
‘That was a pretty important date, and we were not quite as cavalier then as we had been! Stephen Pettitt’s lovely review said something like, “If the music was a revelation, then so was the sound of the choir.” I realised we’d have to build a bigger audience and start communicating with them. It wasn’t just about singing for a group of early music cognoscenti.’
An intense period of recording
International promoters took notice after The Sixteen acquired its own period-instrument band, the Symphony of Harmony and Invention. The turning point came in 1986 when Christophers pitched the idea of recording Handel’s Messiah to Ted Perry.
‘I don’t know how I had the gall!’ he exclaims. ‘Although I’d prepared Messiah for other people, I’d never performed it. “You haven’t got an orchestra,” said Ted. “I’m going to form one,” I replied. And lo and behold, at the end of the conversation, Ted said yes. We did four concerts at Smith Square that Christmas, all recorded live, with up-and-coming soloists: Lynne Dawson, Catherine Denley, Mike George, Maldwyn Davies and David James. Things began to go from there. We did countless Messiahs in Spain, and took it to Japan, Finland, Brazil; we even went to Australia with it.’
Christophers shudders when he recalls recording ten or more albums a year, year after year. ‘It was ridiculous in so many ways. We’d rehearse, perform and record, then put that away and get on with whatever the next project was. After we did Bach’s B minor Mass in 1994, we didn’t perform it again for 10 years, which was crazy. Recording was brilliant and helped spread The Sixteen’s name. But it could never beat giving good concerts.’
As the compact disc market became saturated and labels large and small retrenched, income from concerts mattered more than ever. Unlike many groups that struggled when the short-lived recording boom of the 1980s came to an end, The Sixteen forged solid partnerships with concert promoters in the UK, Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall and the Edinburgh International Festival among them, that guaranteed a steady stream of work.
Creating the Choral Pilgrimage
While it was one thing for The Sixteen to shelter under the umbrella of an existing concert series, it was quite another for it to stake the future on promoting its own gigs. The collapse of a project to commission a work for the Millennium put the risky business of concert promotion on the agenda, tabled in 1999 by Anthony Smith, then chair of The Sixteen’s Development Board.
‘“Why don’t you go around doing concerts at UK cathedrals?” he asked,’ recalls Christophers. ‘We looked at him and said, “Tony, that’s the most ridiculous idea. It’ll bankrupt us!” We thought London was the source of the nation’s musical life. How wrong we were!’
Smith’s brainchild bore fruit in 2000 with what was planned as a one-off Choral Pilgrimage. Its dozen concerts, bookended by performances of Tallis’s Spem in alium at York Minster and Canterbury Cathedral, proved a box-office hit.
‘And here we are, 24 years later, still doing it! I think other colleagues are dead envious of what we’ve created. But it took work to establish and there have been big lulls before it’s taken off again. It all comes down to means and the fact that travel costs are more and hotel costs have doubled. We’ve had to lose one or two places this year, with the hope that we’ll be able to put them back next year.’
The joy of touring with friends
Soprano Katy Hill notes how the pattern of Choral Pilgrimage trips to cathedral cities, ornate chapels, familiar pubs, tea shops and chippies contributes royally to The Sixteen’s close bond. ‘It’s joyful,’ she says, a verdict confirmed by the expression on her face during the choir’s St John’s outing in April.
‘It means that a trip away is social as well as work. I think that translates onto the stage. Having a giggle in the changing room while you’re waiting to go on is the best way to dissipate nerves, especially when Harry is part of it. With him you can bring your own personality to the group, which gives the freedom to get inside the music. That’s a really comfortable place to be. It’s a real privilege.’
Recruiting singers - the launch of Genesis Sixteen
While Oxbridge college choirs have long been a prime source of The Sixteen’s singers, Christophers has widened the recruitment pipeline in recent years to take in talents from other UK universities and the conservatoires. ‘We tend to get very insular in London,’ he comments. ‘We’ve got to look further afield than Oxbridge. We’ve reached many more students from the conservatoires through Genesis Sixteen. They might not necessarily be able to sightread as well as Oxbridge choral scholars but they’re just as musical. If they work with Genesis Sixteen, their reading gets better – it’s no problem! It’s amazing to see the progress in the three weeks we have them across the year.’
Genesis Sixteen, a free programme for young artists chosen by audition, has to date reached 300 UK-based singers through its week-long and weekend sessions led by Christophers and members of his choir. It has grown thanks to funding from investment banker and philanthropist John Studzinski’s Genesis Foundation, which has also supported around 30 new commissions for The Sixteen, including James MacMillan’s Stabat Mater, Fifth Symphony ‘Le grand Inconnu’, and a major composition for 2026, and shorter pieces by, among others, Roxanna Panufnik, Alissa Firsova, Will Todd and Cecilia McDowall.
‘John, bless him, saw in us a group that was going to do something with the money that would make a difference, whether by encouraging or commissioning young composers and performing their work as many times as possible, hopefully recording them and maybe helping them with publishers. Those are all exciting things.’
The Sixteen - looking to the future
Age has been kind to Harry Christophers. He looks much the same as he did when we first met in the early 1990s, and his energy and passion remain undiminished. While retirement is not on the horizon, how do things stand on the succession planning front?
‘We’re constantly thinking about that,’ he replies. ‘The Sixteen’s ethos means there has to be a legacy. It has to continue and Genesis Sixteen has to continue in the same way. The group is very strong and we have phenomenal staff behind us and behind CORO. There will be developments over the next couple of years, and we’ll see where that takes us. But legacy is very much top of the list, to make sure that the traditions we’ve set up – the Choral Pilgrimage, the promotion of young singers, bringing music from the past to life and concentrating on composers of today – continue long into the future.’