‘I tell you what – if you want Christmas …’ says Dr Jeremy Filsell pouring over his shelves of recordings in his wooden-clad office at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in New York City – ‘That’s fantastic.’ Filsell arrives at what he was looking for, points enthusiastically at a purple Resonus Christmas CD entitled Dancing Day and puts it in front of me. ‘It was John Scott’s last disc here.’

Organist and director of music at St Thomas Fifth Avenue from 2004 until his untimely death from a heart attack in 2015, Scott would never see his Christmas album released. Key festive repertoire for the boys appears on this album from 2015, including Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols and John Rutter’s Dancing Day, both of which are central to the ‘Christmas on Fifth Avenue’ concerts that happen at the church during December, pulling a huge audience.

It’s telling that Filsell, director of music since Daniel Hyde left for King’s Cambridge in 2019, wants first to tell me about his predecessor’s Christmas album, rather than his own – No small wonder – released on Acis Records last year. But the past year has been one of stresses and unknowns for Filsell and those at Saint Thomas, as the future of the choir school, home to 28 boy boarders, hangs in the balance. Filsell tells me it’s ‘just a matter of weeks’ until the vestry of the church comes to a decision about the future.

Filsell says there is a ‘tiny window’ in a boy’s life when they’re singing at their best

I arrive at the church from Penn Station in the early afternoon on a Saturday in late October, walking past Times Square and the MOMA art gallery before spotting a small wooden door off to the side of 53rd Street. Filsell meets me with Geoffrey Silver from Acis – a record label which, alongside Signum Classics, has been responsible for recording much of the choir’s recent output. He was himself a chorister at Westminster Abbey and subsequently moved to the States to be a professional singer alongside establishing the label.

I ask Filsell to tell me about the upcoming festive engagements for the choir as we approach the freewheel into Christmas. Often finances are mentioned alongside musical activities throughout our conversation, indicating the looming decision of the choir school’s future. ‘It’s the one major money-earning concert per year, Christmas on Fifth, because it’s just the boys. It’s the pre-Christmas week, festive, all the tinsel on trees and so on and the boys singing. Everybody loves it.’

Saint Thomas Choir School was founded in 1919, 100 years after the church itself, under the direction of T Tertius Noble, who moved to the church from York Minster at the height of his career. Noble believed that a choir school, like those training choristers in York, would be essential to achieving the standard of musical excellence that the parish desired.

Dr Jeremy Filsell is renowned as both a solo organist and pianist (Saint Thomas Fifth Avenue)

In March this year the church’s vestry announced that it had set up what it called a ‘sustainability task force’ to examine various options for balancing its budget and mentioned the possible termination of the choir school. ‘We recognise that the current music program with a residential choir school is unsustainable,’ it said.

‘This church has experienced financial challenges for quite a long time, it’s not a new thing,’ explains Filsell, ‘for the church’s endowment struggles to support sufficiently the institution’s current programming. And of course, having a choir school is a hugely expensive thing.’

Saint Thomas Choir School today charges $20,570 (£15,828) in tuition, but says that expenditure per-student is around $90,000 (£69,254) per year. It is means-tested and, in the current school year, 74 per cent of students received financial aid. The vestry’s letter stated that it would need to raise at least an additional $50m (£38.47m) in endowed funds or an extra $2.5m (£1.92m) in annual revenue for the choir school to operate in its current form.

‘If you make it a fully fee-paying school, then you reduce both your recruiting mechanisms and ability to be diverse (we presently have over 50 per cent South Korean boys from communities in New Jersey). Originally, the boys here were called “charity” boys, and the school started by supporting an education families could never otherwise have had for their children. That financial model remains the case today.’

The choir school currently educates 28 boys between grades 3 and 8

Filsell and Silver explain the past situations of wealthy philanthropists, including giving to the church. ‘All of those mansions on Fifth Avenue, belonging to many who paid to build Saint Thomas Church, have long gone. They’ve been replaced by huge skyscrapers, perhaps the cathedrals to Mammon, so those old-style philanthropists do not exist. Charles Steele, the philanthropist who brought TTS Noble over here, he was J P Morgan’s right-hand man. For 30 years, he wrote open cheques to sustain the school.’

The philanthropists have died, and so there is a risk of losing a tradition that Filsell believes continues to change lives, including his own as a young child. ‘It’s all I wanted to do,’ he says about choral music. ‘But because I started off like these boys at the age of eight, nine, 10 – I got infected with all of this.’

Filsell grew up in Coventry and studied at Oxford University where he was an organ scholar at Keble College and a piano student at the Royal College of Music, thereafter finding a successful career as a solo pianist and organist. Filsell went on to have a largely portfolio career, which included teaching at various institutions including the Royal Academy of Music and Cranleigh School, and singing as a lay clerk at St George’s Chapel Windsor for 10 years.

Having emigrated to the US in 2008, the move to New York and taking over from Daniel Hyde in 2019 was something Filsell says he had not built up to consciously. ‘It was never my ambition to be here. I never thought about doing this kind of work, as I’m approaching the twilight of my career. The last thing I expected to be doing at this stage was this, yet being here seems, in hindsight, to have been a very natural progression.

‘You take this circuitous route and you end up back where you started, which is very bizarre because this is me when I was their age. There’s a huge element at this stage in my career of putting back into the system that which I reaped.’

To keep Christmas fresh is about challenging the boys with new repertoire, says Filsell

The art of training the choir is an art that Filsell takes very seriously. ‘It takes the boys three years to garner the skills they need. You switch them around and put them next to somebody who might be firing on all cylinders – they fire at different stages.’ Filsell believes this makes the choir school an important asset to the chorister experience. ‘You have that tiny window in a boy’s life when they are singing at the best in the treble range, and they’ve got the musical skills to exercise it. They can move me to tears at times. There’s a quality to it which, at certain moments, can just thrill you to the core – you can seemingly perceive in a moment the increasing spiritual and artistic transformation of a boy.

‘We could just have an adult professional choir, but what do you lose? The boy’s voice is so compelling to us because it’s like the caterpillar, the butterfly or it’s like the rainbow. Why are we fascinated by those things? Because we know they’re about to change into something else.’

I’m interested to learn of a choir director’s spiritual life when faced with the complexities of parish life and looming deconstruction. Filsell is apprehensive to be speaking in this way, but his words are captivating. ‘I am drawn to Karen Armstrong’s advocacy of orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, an idea which chimes directly with our collective “work” in liturgy and music. You have the challenge to make your life as meaningful and purposeful as you can possibly make it – to influence people with the gifts that you have found in the most positive and enriching fashion. That’s the search for God, for me. And what better context to do this in,’ Filsell says, as he gestures to the church. ‘What were the builders of the great medieval cathedrals doing? They were building to aspire to the divine. What was Palestrina doing? Was he a believer? We don’t know. But he was creating this elegant, beautiful counterpoint, which was as far as he could aspire to beauty, to the divine. And that’s what we all do, in a different way.’

The day after our conversation in Filsell’s office I return to Saint Thomas for the Sunday morning Eucharist. Geoffrey Silver tells me to arrive early, and so I find a pew at the front to the left and watch Filsell rehearse the choir. The space is so comfortable and familiar that I barely notice the huge numbers building behind me.

Nine verses of Blessed City, Heavenly Salem later I feel at one with the American congregation. The Gloria of Mozart’s Missa brevis in F is punctuated by beautiful solos from the head chorister, Dominic, who agrees to speak to me after the service, delaying his half term holiday by 20 minutes.

Dominic is now 13 and has been in the choir for six years. He does remember being scared when he first joined but says he ‘just wanted to get into the choir as fast as I could. It got better because I started making these friends that are really close to me now. So they’re like family … I play piano here and I started taking organ at another church, because that’s what I want to be, an organist. This is what got me started – hearing it every day. It’s in my head all the time.’ And his favourite music to sing? ‘Parry Blest pair of sirens or Kenneth Leighton’s Second Service.’

I want to know more about maintaining the magic of Christmas and preserving Advent in a place where Christmas begins right outside the door on 1 December in the city’s shopping district. Filsell says it’s about mixing it up and performing music that you won’t find anywhere else.

‘I know how much Messiah means to people. The boys love doing Christmas and Ceremony of Carols. You’ve got those musical pillars, but then amongst that you’re trying new things and challenging them with great repertoire.’

Describing the album, Filsell says it’s Christmas music that ‘confronts’ you as well as that which is familiar and comforting. Voices like pianist and composer Sir Stephen Hough and the late Simon Preston’s music feature heavily, along with Matthew Martin, Judith Bingham, Jonathan Dove and Francis Pott, whose setting of In the bleak midwinter was commissioned by the choir during the pandemic.

What’s certain is that it will be a very different Christmas, whatever decision is made for the choir. But in Filsell, it’s certain that this corner of New York City has someone utterly dedicated to the education of choristers. ‘I think it’s worth fighting for,’ he says. Maintaining the autonomy of the choir school is proving a challenge for those looking at a sustainable future for the church. Bespoke establishments are rarely cost-effective, but the compromise of this one could mean being left with just one chorister-dedicated school in the future of the Anglican church.