It feels strange to talk about a corner of UK classical music that finds itself in rude health in 2024, but, if you’re involved in chamber-sized, professional, secular choral music, it is hard to think of a time where the artform has felt more exciting, or where the standard has been so consistently high. And, in a country which already has a surfeit of world-renowned groups, a younger generation of choirs seem determined to do something a bit different with the form.

When choral director George Parris highlighted some of those groups on X a few months ago, he chose Echo Vocal Ensemble (who had just made their Wigmore Hall debut ahead of their first record Innocence, in music from Palestrina and Clemens non Papa to Shivani Rattan and Meredith Monk), Sansara (off the back of their Morton Feldman-themed tour with Manchester Collective) and his own group The Carice Singers, who had recently performed a memorial concert for Kaija Saariaho to mark the first anniversary of her death.

But Parris could have easily extended his list of groups that are roughly the same age and really hitting their stride: The Marian Consort, The ORA Singers and Manchester’s Kantos Chamber Choir all exist within the same conversation. Add caveats for age, size, style, and audience (EXAUDI, VOCES8, The Gesualdo Six) and what emerges – before you even get to the big hitters – is a rich scene.

Tom Herring, co-founder and artistic director of Sansara, hesitates a little when I ask him what makes his group stand out in that crowded marketplace. ‘There’s so much emphasis on the need to stand out and have a USP,’ he admits. But what Sansara have been investing most energy in of late is in the pursuit of relevance: ‘What we’re aiming to do is to connect the music and the repertoire to relevant, timely social issues.’

This is a relatively new avenue to both the choir and Herring, whose upbringing in choral music was pretty orthodox. He is the son of Bridget Emmerson, a director at artist management agency Intermusica, and his father was a schoolmaster at Winchester, allowing him and his brother to attend the prestigious college. Receiving a music scholarship, he became a Winchester Quirister, connecting to the storied choral lineage of Thomas Weelkes, Jeremiah Clarke, and George Dyson. He made it to the final of BBC Young Chorister of the Year, though his voice broke dramatically two weeks before the final. Eventually choosing music over art (Herring designed the album artwork for their upcoming release In The Midst) he headed to Oxford University, where he read music while a choral scholar at Merton College.

At Oxford, Herring and a few friends set up a loose ensemble of singers and aspiring conductors, to give those with ambitions of leading some flight hours in front of an ensemble. But from the outset, they tried to do things slightly differently. The group that became Sansara would perform concerts with three or four conductors, ‘thinking about how we could present things differently, to try to rethink the top-down hierarchies of a lot of these structures.’ They were also keen to look past the traditional talent pools. ‘If you sing in an Oxbridge choir, there’s a very strong tendency for everything you do to be dominated by Oxford and Oxbridge choral scholars and singers. Our attempt to avoid that kind of exclusivity was really important from the start.’ Former choristers from Winchester, Salisbury, Chichester and York were well-represented from the start.

It appears that Sansara has reverted to the same leadership structure used by almost every choir in existence, but Herring assures me it’s different. ‘We call ourselves a vocal collective, which is a kind of challenge and aspiration,’ he says. This involves ‘creating a structure that is as flat as it can be, within the limitations of rehearsal and performance practices.’

A part of me wonders whether this kind of change is superficial, or at least could be done without dispensing with the word ‘choir,’ but, with recent stories of abuses of power in intertwined musical, administrative and pastoral structures, it is perhaps a price worth paying to ensure workplace health and collegiality is maintained in the long term. ‘There’s no creative health without healthy creatives. The well-being of our singers is ultimately going to lead to the best experience for everyone,’ Herring says. ‘There are still contexts where people perform their best, out of a place of stress and anxiety, rather than comfort and safety.’ This has gone from a guiding principle to a key strand of their work, with the choir undertaking a creative health residency with Britten Pears Arts in 2024 to develop their ‘Rite to Grieve’ project.

The pivot to this kind of purposeful work came during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘I essentially was doing a lot of soul searching about the group and its purpose,’ Herring says.‘Why did the country or the world need another chamber choir? What were we going to do that was going to give our work meaning?’ ‘Rite to Grieve’ was, accordingly, a vital project. In collaboration with Ellie Harrison, organiser of The Grief Series, Sansara created a space for the collective expression of grief and the celebration of lost lives during the pandemic through music, conversation and dedicated workshops, as well as a commission from Rebecca Dale.

At a similar time, Sansara created an entirely different kind of socially engaged project. Working with Dr Alexandra Lloyd at Oxford University, and in collaboration with the White Rose Project, the choir created ‘Traces of the White Rose’ to tell the story of a group of anti-Nazi resistance fighters, who, between 1942 and 1943 created and disseminated pamphlets encouraging resistance to the regime, and were executed for their actions. The project formed the basis of the Sansara album, Traces, which weaves through Clara Schumann, Cornelius, Reger, and the first recording of Ethel Smyth’s Komm, süsser Tod, but a live version appears in podcast form too, with Lloyd and Herring telling the story of the German group through words and letters, and musical interludes. ‘I think it’s one of the most effective live things that we’ve created,’ Herring says.

Another effective live experience they created was a recent collaboration with Manchester Collective on a programme themed around Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. Mark Rothko would never see the opening of his landmark, nondenominational Texan chapel, so Feldman’s piece for choir, percussion and viola soloist – in that tour Ruth Gibson, who appears on In the Midst as a soloist in Shaw’s In manus tuas – becomes both an accidental memorial to the artist, as well as a place for listeners to bring their own contemplations.

A programme around this work seemed the perfect continuation of ideas around grief and contemplation opened up in the ‘Rite to Grieve’, while also looking to the new. Three new commissions used Rothko as a muse: Edmund Finnis’ ‘lament for absent friends,’ Blue Divided by Blue, Katherine Balch’s songs and interludes (which takes Feldman’s interwoven structure and explodes it in a four-way conversation between Balch, Feldman, Rothko, and Virginia Woolf), and Isobel Waller-Bridge’s No. 9, a response to a different Rothko work: White on Black on Wine.

With fluid lighting design by Lewis Howell adding a visual element to proceedings, the project certainly sat at the more adventurous end of choral programming. But the experience was heartening for Herring. ‘What I found so encouraging about that was that, at Southbank Centre and Bridgewater Hall, we had probably the biggest live audiences the choir has performed in front of, and that programme was all new music. It was three new commissions and a half-hour piece of Feldman, and I thought that was really encouraging. There is an audience! It’s about telling the right story.’

Now, Sansara returns with another ambitious, socially engaged project. It began as a concert named ‘Sanctuary and Solidarity’, first performed at St Martin-in-the-Fields with the United Strings of Europe and oud player Basel Saleh in November 2022. The outline of the concert appears on the record, though without Saleh: a programme built around Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands, and outer movements by Hildur Guðnadóttir and Lebanon-based composer Houtaf Khoury. Sansara bass, composer, and new King’s Singer Piers Connor Kennedy provides a response to Shaw’s piece, while Shaw responds to Thomas Tallis’ setting of In manus tuas to complete the disc.

‘Today, millions are forcibly displaced from their homes, set on perilous journeys in search of places of safety,’ the album blurb states. ‘Finding refuge depends on the kindness of others – individuals, communities and nations. But the longing for sanctuary is not always met with open arms.’

‘In The Midst,’ it concludes, ‘is not only an offering of musical solidarity, but an invitation to reflect on our role in creating spaces of sanctuary.’

And if Sansara were searching for relevant, timely subjects to interrogate through music, then there can be few better issues to highlight than an international migrant crisis that is currently extremely underreported. The night before Herring and I meet, Ben Steele’s landmark documentary, Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?, airs on primetime BBC Two, and garners remarkably little reaction in an election-dominated news cycle.

The 90-minute investigative piece, which focuses on the Greek coastguard’s involvement in the sinking of the fishing vessel Adriana in 2023, raises the extremely serious allegations that 43 migrants deaths between 2020 and 2023 directly involved the Greek coastguard, and that nine of those deaths involved migrants being thrown into the sea.

It can often feel like conversations around such almost unfathomable human struggles are still in their infancy. Herring feels a similar way about political conversations in the choral world – that the underlying context is only just starting to emerge to support such conversations.

‘I think it’s important that there is a political space within professional choral music, but at the same time, we don’t want to force really strong views on people. We tried to describe things as an invitation to engage with these issues, rather than saying, “This is how it is, and what you should think about it.” ’

This is new ground in their niche of choral music, and, with their ongoing commitment to creative health and collective leadership, you can perhaps see why Sansara treads carefully through such subjects.

It’s a beautifully recorded album, the second of a three-album run with Platoon, the Apple-owned label that is putting significant resources into up-and-coming classical artists. Particularly striking are Guðnadóttir’s sombre Folk faer andlit, a gorgeous, deeply atmospheric recording where you feel the luxurious weight of the heavy post-production, and Shaw’s To the Hands, a piece based on the Ad Manus from Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri but that bears a strong resemblance to her famous Partita for Eight Voices and is mixed in a similar way to the canonic Roomful of Teeth Partita, with surround-sound popping helping to elucidate Shaw’s frantic textures.

There are, however, a couple of things that Herring concedes that Sansara might do differently next time. The works on the album mostly centre the same viewpoint – of the thoughts and feelings of those giving sanctuary, rather than the displaced peoples whose voices are most in need of amplification and solidarity.

Herring is in conversation with social change organisation Together Productions about the potential for the future choral collaboration with one of their choirs.

‘If I’m honest, I struggle to find promoters that want to take these types of projects on,’ he says.

‘There’s a lot of promoters that I think are worrying about selling something like this.’ The balance of needing to speak out and needing to stay in the room where your voice might be heard is felt profoundly in the current economic climate.

‘I definitely don’t think that we’ve got things totally right across the board,’ Herring concludes.

‘But I think also that there needs to be that acceptance that is never going to be totally right. And I would prefer to attempt to engage with issues and attempt to talk about things, than totally avoid them.’ Let’s hope that Sansara keeps talking about these big issues constructively as it pursues its undoubtedly bright future.

In the midst by Sansara is out on Platoon on 6 September / A concert celebrating the album is at the Barbican Centre on 14 December. barbican.org.uk

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of Choir & Organ. Never miss an issue – subscribe today