Interview, Harry Christophers on 'Angel of Peace'

Beloved British choir The Sixteen have just launched their 2025 'Choral Pilgrimage' (marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the inaugural such tour), subtitled 'Angel of Peace' and with a range of concerts and workshops around the UK and Ireland. Accompanying the tour is an album of the repertoire they'll be performing - a surprising yet perfectly-blended mix of Taverner, Bingen, Pärt and new works by Will Todd and Anna Clyne that add the sound of a solo violin to that of the choir. 

I spoke to The Sixteen's founder and director Harry Christophers about this project, the works he's chosen, and what makes them so unique.

Image credit: Marco Borggreve

What inspired this album, and how did the programme for it take shape in your mind?

With these Choral Pilgrimage programmes that are 90% sacred music, a lot of the motets from more recent centuries are only about three or four minutes long, so I feel I need something of more substance. So I started with the Taverner, these two pieces Gaude plurimum and O splendor gloriae. 

I'd recorded them many years ago back in the '80s on Hyperion, when there was this theory that music of this kind should be performed up a minor third which made the soprano lines rather squeaky. 

But over the years I think I've grown up, and realised that if you put it back at the original pitch it works just as well. We all thought it would never sound the same if you did that - it would lose that ethereal, celestial quality - but actually it sounds so much better. The sonorities work better, and there's no lack of majesty.

So I started with those two, and it was nice to revisit them after so long. My ideas about them have changed so much. That was the basis - but because you've got those two chunky pieces in each half, I need something to combat that in a sense. I'd done Pärt back in about 2016, with the programme called The Deer's Cry, which was really successful - so I thought I'd look a bit more at his stuff, and that's where that came from. Funnily enough when I was putting this programme together a couple of years ago I hadn't clocked that it was his 90th birthday this year! So that was nice. 

Then there were the two commissions. About three years ago the Genesis Foundation commissioned Will Todd to write a piece based on that text by Cardinal Newman, and when we were talking it over I suggested the combination of violin and choir. And he looked at me for a moment and then said he thought it might work. He really loved writing it - he sort of weaves the violin part into it very well. 

And having that piece already, I was thinking about another commission and it seemed right to commission someone else to write for the same forces. I'd really liked Anna's music for a long time - she's principally an orchestral composer, but I also came across a piece for, I think, voice and string quartet, and I really loved what she did with the voice. So we spoke about that and exchanged ideas about texts. 

So did you end up working fairly closely with Will and Anna on I shall be an angel of peace and Orbits?

Yes, very collaborative. We've worked a lot with Will and he knows us well; Anna less so, though she was thrilled to write for us and it worked very well. Her violin part is fabulous; quite folky in a way, and it makes the music feel faster. A lot of sacred music is really quite slow, but this piece is very active. We talked a lot about the voices, which I've always done when commissioning works - even back in 2000 when we commissioned a work from James MacMillan for the first time. The vocal ranges are important, and knowing what works - particularly for us. You don't want the sopranos on top Cs pianissimo, and likewise you don't want the basses on bottom Ds fortissimo and things like that. 

For me, the collaborative element is the whole point of commissioning. In the past I've done things with orchestras that you perform once and are never heard again; that's not really what we need. And part of the point of the Choral Pilgrimage is that we're going to have twenty or thirty concerts and people will get to really hear this music. 

Likewise for us as performers, we can really get properly into it - particularly Pärt. He doesn't put much on the page! I remember when I interviewed him about fifteen years ago for the BBC, and I asked him: "You don't put very much into the music - you have scores where there's no indication at all of anything! Why is that?" And he was quiet for a bit and then he said "I just want people to find their own way into my music." 

And to be honest at first I thought that was a bit of a cop-out…! But it really is what we began to find. The piece The Deer's Cry itself - the more we performed and rehearsed that, the more we found our own individual ways into it. And likewise with the pieces on this album. Da pacem is very simple, just in four parts, and looks so simple on paper - but the result is completely mesmeric, and the choir absolutely love it.

You mention that the two sizeable Taverner works recorded here would have been performed devotionally, after the conclusion of Compline. What sort of environment and atmosphere would this have been?

So we're talking about Catholic liturgy here - in the early 1500s. Anything that was Marian of this kind - like these motets of nearly quarter of an hour in length - would be sung facing a statue of the Virgin Mary at the end of the service. In those days religion was very much a part of institutions and colleges - in Taverner's time it was Cardinal College though later became Christ Church Cathedral. These would have been sung for the glory of God first and foremost, and for the intimacy between the performers. 

I suspect they would have used them after any big service or occasion, like a feast day. With Taverner we're talking a couple of decades after the Eton Choirbook - where the composers are writing very intricate music. This is slightly simpler, it's better worked, the verse sections hang together better, and then you get the full sections that are really sonorous and amazing. 

But it's just for the benefit of the performers themselves, plus God who would be listening in? No congregation or 'audience'?

Well, not quite - all these places were different but my feeling is that it's not the same as what was happening on the Continent. In a lot of the cathedrals there there's an intimate quire section and then the ordinary people would be somewhere outside and would hear the music but not see the performers. Whereas in these colleges, the whole setting is more intimate. I imagine that the clergy and everyone associated with the college would be there. It almost feels like a Philip Pullman novel! So everyone, I suspect, would have gone to chapel - perhaps a hundred and twenty people.

Arvo Pärt’s now-famous tintinnabulation technique is instantly recognisable and clearly strikes a chord with listeners. Are you aware of anyone else taking up this technique and developing it, or does it remain a compositional ‘school’ of one?

There are people who have done similar things - I think because it is so special people have imitated it in different ways. Maybe some of David Lang's music? That kind of minimalist feeling is there, but you're right, it's not the same. And if you look at Arvo Pärt's music from earlier in his career, it's really avant-garde, particularly the orchestral music. And then he had this complete change. 

I believe it coincided with him moving out of Estonia - he needed to get out in order for people to be able to encounter his music, so the family moved to Germany - and at the same time he was going right back to basics. Back to the idea of one note, or even of silence. And I think it's the silence aspect that is so special.

Yes - all those empty bars in Tribute to Caesar...

Yes, they're extraordinary. And the way he then drops in the other notes - a second note in the chord and then the triad - just placing them in that way. He doesn't work to a formulaic pattern. So when you get to something really special, like at the end of Tribute to Caesar with the wonderful chord for 'when they had heard these words, they marvellèd'. It's so beautiful and powerful, partly because we've been waiting eight minutes for it!

Certainly there have been people that have tried to do something similar, but it's never wise to try and imitate too closely. I remember when I started conducting I loved someone's interpretation of a work, and thinking I'd like to do it the same way - and that was the last time I ever tried to do what someone else had done!

For us in this particular programme, the works are highlighted by everything that's around them; each half I've decided to open with some Hildegard, which puts it all in a different context. Someone was asking me about it the other day, and we got into a discussion about whether it was really plainsong - of course it's a single line (admittedly we add a drone, which may or may not have been done originally) but we think there may have been a tradition of embellishing it or bending the pitch in various places. 

Likewise, why is Hildegard such a unique figure? Surely she must have had pupils and students of her own, or at the very least exerted some influence on musical tastes through her compositions?

Oh, she certainly did have influence in her time - she was born into a wealthy family anyway, and was about seven or eight when she entered the abbey, and then that was her life; but she was very much active in the world. She was a diplomat, a woman of letters - not just a composer. And first and foremost she was a poet - and that's really what sets her music aside from being plainsong. Yes, it's in Latin, and of course all the plainsong chants themselves have their own beauty, but Hildegard's own texts are just gorgeous. And what's more, the vocal ranges are astonishing - you sort of want to know who these people were that she was writing for!

Whereas in plainsong sometimes you're lucky to have a range of more than a fourth…

We do know that these were, again, primarily for private devotional use - but I find it extraordinary. And in the context of this programme it sets the otherworldly tone. It will be interesting to see, over the course of the whole Pilgrimage, how much we might push things in terms of risking just a bit more individuality.

Presumably things do shift during such a long sequence of performances?

Yes, they change. We always find this - every year we find ourselves wanting to record the programme again at the end, to capture how much it's developed. Obviously the recording itself is great, but the beauty of the Pilgrimage is that each venue gives us something different. One acoustic might allow us to bring out the intricacies of the Taverner, for instance, or another might make the Pärt sound particularly special. That's always our challenge, and it's why we love doing these things - no two venues are the same.

Pärt and some of his rough contemporaries (Górecki, Tavener etc) are sometimes described - or marketed - as ‘holy minimalists’, though many of them are at best ambivalent about the term…! Do you think it’s a reasonable summary of their approach to music?

It's weird, isn't it. I think it is definitely a marketing term - I would always prefer to say that they're simply incredibly spiritual. It doesn't have to have an actual sacred context behind it. With Arvo Pärt's music, 90% of it you see being performed in concerts! There are only one or two pieces that you might hear in a church or a cathedral, in that religious context.