Page 40 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

14 April 2019

MUSIC
Harry Christophers interview: the

Sixteen’s leader on a crazy pilgrimage

As the chamber choir tour churches from Truro to Edinburgh, their

conductor tells Hugh Canning about their 40th anniversary plans

Hugh Canning
Sunday April 14 2019, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

Steeped in church choral music: the Sixteen’s Harry Christophers
ADRIAN MYERS

Harry Christophers and his chamber choir, the Sixteen, have been synonymous with

the performance of Renaissance, and specifically English Tudor, music since their first
London concerts in 1979. Their 40th anniversary year features their annual Choral
Pilgrimage, now in its 19th year, which began earlier this month and resumes in June. In the
intervening months, Christophers and his musicians will prepare a staging of Handel’s
Belshazzar at the Grange Festival, Hampshire. And in August he will conduct the world
premiere of James MacMillan’s choral symphony Le Grand Inconnu at the Edinburgh
International Festival.

In fact, MacMillan has been fairly central to the Sixteen’s recent repertoire, and the
Pilgrimage’s Voices of Angels programme includes his setting of O virgo prudentissima,
commissioned by John Studzinski, of the Genesis Foundation, who also stumped up the
money for the new symphony.

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