Page 48 - FINAL_The Sixteen Coverage Book 40th Anniversary Year

With the conservatoires pumping out brilliant young singers every year,

getting a place in The Sixteen is a rare and coveted honour, and
Christophers’ recruitment strategy is not what you’d expect. “When I do

auditions,” he says, “character and personality are as important as the

voice. You can take it for granted these days that applicants will have a
good voice and can sing all the notes, but it’s more about how they get on

with the person next to them, and how they gel with the group as a
whole. If somebody’s ill, I’m very particular about who the replacement

should be.”

He applies these principles to the training he also supervises on The
Sixteen’s Genesis programme, through which young singers fresh out of

conservatoire learn the tricks of the trade. “All new members sing a
piece to me, and the first thing I say is: ‘Don’t sing in the way you think I

want to hear – be yourself, sing as naturally as you speak.’”

The purpose of this project – which provides new recruits to cathedral
choirs up and down the country – is to show young singers the realities

they will come up against. While top soloists like Sarah Connolly and

Christopher Purves (a former Sixteen member) give voice coaching,
other tutors tell students about gritty necessities like agents and tax,
while an ENT surgeon – once a singer himself – comes in to explain how

the voice works, what can happen to it, and how important it is not to

tear it to shreds by pushing it too soon or too hard. “And about not
drinking too much after a concert, and not going out for a hot curry,

because everybody does these things,” adds Christophers. “This sort of
advice is so important, yet none of the colleges had thought of offering it

when we started doing so.”

The Eton Choirbook is the cornerstone of The Sixteen’s Renaissance
repertoire – a massive compilation of vocal works by many English

composers, whose survival was miraculous: it had been sent to a binder
when Eton College had its destructive visitation by the iconoclasts of the

Reformation, so it escaped destruction; it spent the next 300 years
gathering dust in a library. The Sixteen’s modern cornerstone is the

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