Words by Hugh Canning. Photograph by Jason Bye
Back in the year 2000, two of Britain’s leading specialist chamber choirs embarked on ambitious millennial concert tours. John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage with the Monteverdi Choir programmed all 200 of Bach’s church cantatas, mostly in churches around Britain, Europe and New York. It almost bankrupted the company and led to the conductor’s rift with his then label, Deutsche Grammophon, which had planned to record all the concerts, but withdrew as costs spiralled (the mostly excellent musical results are now emerging on Gardiner’s in-house label, SDG).
Harry Christophers and the Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage of great British cathedrals and churches may have been more modest in scale, but it has proved a popular fixture on the country’s concert calender. Now celebrating its 10th year, the pilgrimage started in February and runs to October, making 26 stops in the most magnificent ecclesiastical buildings — the cathedrals of Winchester, Norwich, Peterborough, Wells and Durham, the minsters of York and Southwell, Oxford’s University Church, the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge, Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk and Tewkesbury Abbey — with a programme drawn from the golden age of English polyphony, Ceremony and Devotion: Music for the Tudors, by John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.
This week, BBC Four will broadcast the final episode of a second series of Sacred Music, performed by Christophers and the Sixteen, and fronted by the music-loving actor — and former choral scholar — Simon Russell Beale. The first four episodes — The Gothic Revolution; Palestrina and the Popes; Tallis, Byrd and the Tudors;
Bach and the Lutheran Legacy — have just been issued on DVD, and concerts of the music from the television programmes will form part of the Easter weekend celebrations at the Southbank Centre. In September, the music will reach an even wider audience when the entire series is repeated on BBC2, a clear indicator of its success.
Locating suitable venues for the music has evidently been a labour of love, and has resulted in several surprises. Brahms and Bruckner — featured in the second series — was recorded at Douai Abbey, near Newbury, while Fauré and Poulenc went to Arundel Cathedral — “the closest we’ve got to a French gothic building”, Christophers says. “The Italian church in Clerkenwell, modelled on Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome, was the setting for Palestrina and the Popes, Waltham Abbey for the Tudors.”
“My happiest discovery,” he continues, “was the little Lutheran chapel for the Bach programme in Aldgate East, built by the German community — sugar merchants — about 40 years after Bach’s death. It’s not in use now, and the acoustic was not ideal, but visually it was perfect. The look of the programmes, thanks to the architecture, is gorgeous.”
It’s the music, and Russell Beale’s and Christophers’s enthusiasm for it, which has made the series so beguiling. The Sixteen may be known best as a specialist choir, but its repertoire ranges widely, from medieval to the baroque, then a big leap, bypassing most of the Romantics, to the 20th century.
“We recorded all of Poulenc’s choral music for Virgin years ago,” the conductor says. “We’ve done Frank Martin and all of the Britten pieces, which we will repackage for the centenary of his birth in 2013. I’ve perhaps left out Brahms and Bruckner, but there is a financial consideration, because you need much larger forces.”
Recording is central to the Choral Pilgrimage project. Christophers makes no bones about the attraction of recording a programme, taking it around the country and selling it on disc. This is one of the realities of the classical record industry today. The multinationals insist on their artists touring their programmes, and the Sixteen, which has its own label, Coro, has made it a centrepiece of its marketing strategy.
The company gets no core funding for its everyday operations, but this year’s pilgrimage has an Arts Council grant of £25,000. (Last year, it was £50,000 for a Handel anniversary programme based on the Coronation Anthems, which require bigger numbers, including an orchestra.) The rest — including the company’s office space in Fleet Street, donated by Quadrant Chambers — comes from sponsorship and box-office income.
During the 10 years of the Sixteen’s pilgrimage, Christophers has presided over a huge surge in public enthusiasm for Tudor music, and he brings a passion and sensuality to the great Roman Catholic anthems and motets that some of his more austere rivals abjure.
“To do this type of music, you need special singers,” he says. “The way we do 16th-century music is, I hope, more adventurous than other specialist choirs. I don’t just strive for a beautiful sound — people expect that, of course, excellent tuning and ensemble, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of this music.”
The meaning of the texts, even when sung in Latin, is obviously of paramount importance to his interpretation of the music. “Often, it depends on the piece,” he says. “Something like Sheppard’s Media vita, where you’ve got long melismas [florid melodic sequences set to a single syllable], you have to put the effects across in the shape of the music.
“Back in the old days, when I was at Oxford, there was no bending of the tempo, but to me this music has to have ebb and flow and light and shade. It has to be interpreted just as much as, say, a Handel oratorio. Byrd is complex and quite dense, but the political messages that are going on in his music are fascinating.
“The other big piece we’re doing this year is his Infelix ego. It’s a setting of a paraphrase of the Miserere mei psalm, written by the visionary friar Savonarola in prison, shortly before he was burnt at the stake. One of the great things about the BBC’s Sacred Music series was performing Byrd’s four-part masses with only four singers at Ingatestone Hall [in Essex]. Byrd wrote them for secret Masses celebrated there, so the forces must have been minimal. Infelix ego would also have been sung one voice to a part, because it’s pretty political. There can’t have been much doubt about the subversive content of the text.”
Certainly, hearing Byrd’s great protest anthem in University Church, Oxford, where Archbishop Cranmer was tried and degraded before being taken to the stake, hammered home the relationship between music and the religious politics of the era in which it was written. Sheppard’s staggering 24-minute Media vita, probably written in memory of a deceased colleague at Magdalen College (where the composer was informator choristarum from the last four years of Henry VIII’s reign to the first of the Protestant Edward VI) sounded thrilling in this historic church, resonant with contemporary echoes.
Christophers believes that the current popular interest in the Tudors has fired an interest in the music of the period. “The guy who plays Tallis in the television series The Tudors looks exactly like him [more than can be said for Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Henry VIII]. Of course, Byrd and Tallis have been done in cathedrals for ages, but the dean and chapters aren’t going to allow choirs to sing pieces that last more than 15 minutes in services.
“What groups like ours have done is to bring some of the more obscure and larger pieces of the Tudor repertoire to life for contemporary audiences.”
This article originally appeared in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine on 28th March 2010 and can be seen online at: