Harry Christophers directs his choir through an undulating contrapuntal pattern. He is focused, swinging one arm and listening intently. His singers move with him, hearing the sounds waft among the rafters and adjusting their pitch incrementally as it feeds back.

The Sixteen are singing a new commission that they are recording for their 25th Choral Pilgrimage. Anna Clyne’s work Orbits, accompanied by a violin, is rhythmically complex, and Christophers works on it with precision. There are repetitions, of course, and moments where Christophers asks for greater rhythmic clarity, but the process is undeniably calm.

It’s a bright autumn morning in early November when I join the group at a recording session for their upcoming Choral Pilgrimage at one of their favourite recording venues – All Hallows Gospel Oak, the Anglo-Catholic church sitting in a quiet corner of the north London suburb, close to Hampstead Heath. This is usually how The Sixteen’s annual pilgrimage begins – with the recording of the album that will then be toured throughout the year around cathedrals, churches and chapels across the UK. This practice of recording an album before touring it, and selling the new CD after each performance, has been hugely successful; it’s a simple concept that we are used to seeing in the pop industry, but has rarely been taken up by classical musicians.

The Choral Pilgrimage for 2025 will have the new Clyne commission alongside works by Hildegard of Bingen and Arvo Pärt, who celebrates his 90th birthday this year. Commissioning new works has for years been part of the Choral Pilgrimage tradition, resulting in contributions from Bob Chilcott, James MacMillan, Dobrinka Tabakova and Cecilia McDowall, among many others.

I sit down with Christophers in the church’s nave during a break following a take of one of the Hildegard pieces. During that take, he had moved to the back of the church, allowing the resonance of the upper voices to carry without his direction. ‘We can have amazing effects in the church,’ he tells me. ‘On the recording, there’s no extra halo being put on the Hildegard – we’re hearing what the church gives us.’

Recording is something organic for Christophers, who says he’s never been interested in adding ‘gimmicks’ to The Sixteen’s sound, but wants the album to emulate the experience of hearing them live in concert. This means accepting the odd blemish and dealing with the mysteries of recording in different venues. ‘Some acoustics prefer flat keys to sharp keys,’ he observes. ‘In another church we record in – St Augustine’s, Kilburn – we have problems with tuning in sharp keys. That place really loves flat keys.’

Buildings have been central to much of The Sixteen’s work over the 25 years since the start of the Choral Pilgrimage – a project that was first suggested by a member of the group’s board. ‘It was a chap – a past president of Magdalen College, Oxford – who was chairman of our development board,’ Christophers recalls, ‘a lovely man called Tony Smith, who sadly died a few years ago. He was always full of ideas and said: “You should be going out to all the cathedrals and abbeys up and down the country.” There was silence. We looked at him and said, “That’s madness. We’ll be bankrupt in a year.”’

Christophers’s methods and ethos focus on cultivating a positive environment (photography: Andy Paradise)

After risking the first year as a trial run, the group were shocked to find the pilgrimage to be a great success. ‘We had an editorial written by Simon Jenkins because he had just published his book about churches,’ Christophers explains. ‘The initial idea was to bring the music of the past back to the buildings that it was written for. All the composers of the Renaissance were writing with the buildings in mind – just as the people who had been the architects of the cathedrals had the music in mind. So the two fit hand in hand.’

Renaissance polyphony and Tudor music were the foundation of The Sixteen’s early pilgrimages, and hence of its recording output. It was an interest that stemmed from Christophers’s own education, first as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral and then as an academical clerk at Magdalen College, Oxford, under Bernard Rose. He recalls, ‘Rose was mad on Tomkins and edited stacks of it. Suddenly all this music opened up to be performed.’ Christophers then became a professional singer at Westminster Abbey and in the BBC Singers, but soon he decided he wanted to conduct, and to perform this sort of music himself with his own group.

‘I felt there was something missing with the way it was being performed,’ he reflects. ‘The notes on the page do take top place, but actually so should the words. Very few people who come to our concerts today know the Latin, so in the way we perform it, we’ve got to convey that expression. We’ve got to show what’s happening in the music.’

The Sixteen’s early engagement with Tudor and Renaissance music led to recordings for Hyperion, and at this time Christophers was stuck in the ‘up a minor third theory’ developed by his Oxford tutor David Wulstan. There are two Taverner pieces in the 2025 Choral Pilgrimage which The Sixteen recorded at the higher pitch for Hyperion in 1989 and 1991; Christophers tells me he is glad to be revisiting this music at its original pitch. ‘We were all obsessed with it at the time. But I’ve now grown up!’ Christophers laughs. ‘It’s nice to revisit them now and put in a bit more interpretation and personality. I don’t know why I didn’t alter them earlier. The sonority changes and the music is even more magical.’

I’m keen to understand how Christophers puts together the pilgrimage programmes and how this has developed over the years. He begins to take me through the process and is very enthusiastic about the art of developing themes and thinking about which pieces work well together. He is often thinking through future pilgrimage ideas in his head. ‘We’ve done Cornysh with Sacred and Profane by Britten,’ he tells me. ‘I think if groups like us are not doing the Britten, then that piece is not going to be heard. Last year’s pilgrimage included Lassus. Most of the audience hadn’t heard his music, but I get the sense that because the pilgrimages are so established, people come to the concert feeling that, “Actually, if The Sixteen believe in this music, it must be OK”!’

When I was still at school in Manchester, I went to the Bridgewater Hall’s edition of the Choral Pilgrimage in 2016. That programme, ‘The Deer’s Cry’, has become one of significance to the group, who recently toured the US with it. Placing music by Pärt and Byrd side by side was a revelation that seems to have comforted many, myself included – I have returned often to the recording. In fact, this is the first album Christophers mentions when I ask whether any pilgrimages stand out. ‘That was amazing,’ he enthuses, ‘big Byrd pieces like Ad Dominum cum tribularer, and Tribue, Domine, a massive one in three sections. The Pärt was a palate cleanser, but it also made the audience focus on all his tintinnabulations, stillness and silences.’ Another that stands out for Christophers is the 2012 pilgrimage, ‘The Earth Resounds’, with Josquin, Brumel and Lassus. ‘It was amazing – the first time I’d ever done Josquin. That was quite a big-scale programme.’

In 25 years, have there been any pilgrimages that were less successful? ‘There was a Victoria one,’ Christophers is happy to admit. ‘We’d done the Requiem in a programme that had been successful, and then a few years later we wanted to do a pilgrimage that was much more about the Virgin Mary. For that we recorded more Victoria, and I suppose it became a little bit too much of the same.’ But then he immediately counters that this less successful programme was later followed by a pilgrimage focused on Guerrero and Lobo, a project of special creative vigour. ‘This 16th-century Spanish repertoire was an absolute revelation,’ he says. ‘We called it “Flight of Angels”, and the album had part of an El Greco painting on the front. That was absolutely amazing.’

Bringing fascinating and creative programmes to beautiful venues throughout the country: The Sixteen singing at the Tower of London in 2022 (photography: Ami Creates)

Returning to the 2025 Choral Pilgrimage, angels are once again mentioned in the title, the album described thus: ‘In an age of resurgent conflict and frenetic demands on our attention, “Angel of Peace” offers a slice of tranquility.’ The music spans nine centuries from Hildegard and Taverner to Clyne, Pärt and Will Todd, whose I Shall be an Angel of Peace was commissioned by the Genesis Foundation for The Sixteen in 2021.

Christophers frequently returns to the impact of the support from the Genesis Foundation – founded by John Studzinski in 2001 to sustain artistic career development – and its training programme for singers run in collaboration with The Sixteen, Genesis Sixteen. This programme, for 18- to 23-year-olds, was launched in 2011 and has since seen notable alumni, such as mezzo Beth Taylor (a finalist in BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2023), tenor Matthew McKinney (who recently won the top prize in the Kathleen Ferrier Awards) and soprano Charlotte Bowden (a prizewinner in the London Handel Festival’s 2024 International Handel Singing Competition).

Christophers reflects on how Genesis Sixteen started: ‘I was worried about where the next generation of ensembles was coming from. There was a sparsity about 15 years ago. With Genesis Sixteen, we’re getting people who haven’t necessarily got great experience. Being able to sightread is not important. Personality and musicality are what’s important. I would love to think that Genesis Sixteen has become a model for our colleagues, whether The Tallis Scholars or others. We have two regulars now in the main choir who have come through Genesis, but that wasn’t the point. It was about showing everybody what’s possible in the music industry if you have a real passion.’

In recent years, The Sixteen’s record label, Coro (formed in 2001), has developed new artists and branched out into new collaborations. ‘When we started Coro, everyone said, “You’re stark raving bonkers to start a record company when everyone else is going under,”’ Christophers reflects, ruefully. In 1990, during the CD boom, The Sixteen were signed by Collins Classics, which allowed the group to have complete artistic control. ‘It was all totally artist-led,’ Christophers says. ‘So for the best part of the ’90s I recorded around forty albums, ranging from the Eton Choir Book to Stravinsky and Poulenc.’ But by the late ’90s, gone were the open chequebooks. Collins Classics folded and Christophers saw that the quality recordings the group had made were under threat. The decision was taken to launch Coro. ‘We thought, “We’ve got to get these recordings back.” We were loaned the money to do that, and we agreed to pay it back over six years. We repackaged three or four titles a year from the early days of Collins Classics, sold them at concerts and basically repaid the loan in three years. And part of the reason for doing the Choral Pilgrimage was to record an album and tour it. Simple. Nobody else in classical music had done that, but the pop industry had done it for years. In the classical industry, we were inept.’

Christophers continues: ‘We don’t sell anywhere near the numbers of albums we used to at concerts because youngsters don’t have CD players and everything’s on Spotify.’ He is not in denial about the struggles of the recording industry but is determined to look onwards. ‘We have to be ahead of the game and get digitally wise.’

Bringing on new Coro artists is part of this future. In June 2015, Coro Connections was launched, with artists such as the Hilliard Ensemble, organist Robert Quinney and vocal ensemble I Fagiolini appearing on the label. Most recently, Coro signed the Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, whose album ‘Peace I Leave with You’ was issued last year. ‘It’s important that Coro brings on people that we regard as family,’ says Christophers.

The more I discover about Christophers, the more I hear of others’ respect, but also fondness, for him. He is, above all, a man with kindness at his core. It feels strangely radical to have someone at the head of such a successful enterprise in classical music whose methods and ethos focus on cultivating a positive environment. After our initial conversation at All Hallows, I called Christophers early in the new year to ask about leadership and to get to know the human, personal side of him that others have told me so much about.

‘I think if you talk to anyone in The Sixteen, they regard it as a family,’ he says when I ask about his leadership style. ‘My job is to bring the best out of them and that’s definitively not through fear or domination or anything like that. It’s just not me, I suppose. In the early days, some might have thought I was a bit of a pushover.’ His reflection on these common power dynamics of the past suggests his approach has been, until now, somewhat countercultural. ‘I remember ages ago we were doing a recording session with an orchestra. Some of them said to me, “Harry, we usually spend most of our recording session listening to the conductor and the producer shouting at each other!” But why? I have worked with my producer and my recording engineer, Mark Brown and Mike Hatch, for years, and recording sessions are a lot of fun.

‘I’m very much a family man,’ he concludes. ‘When it comes to Genesis Sixteen, for instance, I just love working with younger people. The only thing is that as I get a year older, they get a year younger!’

If you imagine choral conductors at home in the evenings, there might be a misconception that motets and madrigals continue to blast from headphones or speakers. But for Christophers, his own private listening has always been dominated by a lifelong passion for rock music, as well as some occasional Mahler and Stravinsky on a Sunday afternoon. ‘My actual listening time is when I’m cooking in the kitchen. I’m afraid that – actually, I’m not afraid at all – the music on my playlist is 99 per cent pop. Honestly, some people would not really want to see some of the stuff on there! I remember hearing Eric Clapton being interviewed on the radio once, and they asked, “What do you listen to after gigs?” He said, “I listen to Wagner.” If I’m driving back home after a concert, to keep myself awake I’ll blast all my pop stuff. It just makes me smile! I’m into the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull – it’s incredible that they’re all from my youth and yet they’re still mainstays of rock music today.’

This wide reach of Christophers’s listening is reflected in the people who attend Choral Pilgrimage concerts and who continue to follow The Sixteen. ‘It’s amazing the sort of people who are interested in what we’re doing. People like Damon Albarn and John Evan – who used to be the pianist for Jethro Tull in the early days and who came to our concerts in Australia and absolutely loved them. Elvis Costello is a big fan of classical music, and he often appears at our concerts. There’s a real crossover in our audiences …’ He pauses. ‘But it comes down to just enjoying the music.’