City bankers scurry past, mobile phones clamped to their ears. But their free ears could catch the famous sounds of Allegri’s Miserere soaring up from beneath their well-polished shoes. For in the bright and airy basement of the Dutch Church, just behind the Bank of England, the Sixteen choir is busy rehearsing the work for their Choral Pilgrimage 2013.

The Miserere was for long the exclusive property of Rome’s Sistine Chapel — so recently in the spotlight during the Papal conclave. If any member of the Sistine choir smuggled out a copy of the Miserere score, he faced excommunication. But the Papal guards couldn’t prevent someone memorising the music, and carrying it out in his head. And that, according to legend, is what 14-year-old Mozart did. But is the legend true, I ask Sixteen founder and director Harry Christophers after the rehearsal.

“It’s a small part of a long myth. Numerous famous people went to hear the work, and Mozart wrote it down. He went a second time, to make sure he’d taken it down properly. Mendelssohn also wrote it down, and Dickens went to Rome to hear it — but he couldn’t get in, and had to listen from outside.

“What we’re doing with our performance of the Miserere is we’re basically showing its evolution,” Harry continues. “We know for a fact that nothing survives from Allegri’s time — the first available manuscript is from about 30 years after his death, which shows the piece in its very basic form. We do know that it was embellished — that was one of the stock-in-trade tricks of musicians at the time. So what we have today is a patchwork quilt. We’re taking the first sources of any embellishment, and I’ve slightly altered them. Our performance then comes round full circle to what we normally hear today. So people are not deprived of the famous top C bit, but what they’ll hear is something which is much more harmonically interesting.”

The Pilgrimage concerts will also include a second Miserere — by James MacMillan. The work is dedicated to Harry Christophers and the Sixteen, and they premiered it in 2010. Harry laughs when I suggest that the Sixteen would surely have become bored, had MacMillan produced something that was easy to sing.

“It’s a tricky piece, but we’ve mast-ered it now. Like many composers, he utilises techniques from the past, but he turns them into his own voice. When I first got the score, I saw a different element to James: I saw his Celtic drone sounds, and his fast rhythms, but then, on page three or four, I found this very Moorish sound. It’s so evocative. It’s a gut-churning piece, and the singers absolutely adore it. Today we’ve got a lot of extra young singers rehearsing with us — it’s turning into their favourite piece of all time.”

I recognise two of the young singers, having met them last summer when they were at Harry’s Oxford alma mater, Magdalen College, which every year hosts his other great passion, Genesis Sixteen, a programme which aims to train and nurture the next generation of talented young professional ensemble singers.

Does he ever relax? “I try not to be a workaholic, but I love what I do,” he laughs. “But I do switch off — I much enjoy cooking for my wife and four children, though they are now adults. And I love my sport: I’m a big Arsenal supporter.”

 

 

The details:

  • Saturday, April 13, 8pm
     
  • Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
     
  • Box Office: 01865 305305