Nicola Lisle asks Harry Christophers and singer Sally Dunkley of The Sixteen

It’s spring, which means choral group The Sixteen is setting out on its annual Choral Pilgrimage. This year’s pilgrimage has particularly strong Oxford connections, and is entitled The Voice of the Turtle Dove. Sounds a bit twee? Absolutely not, says Sixteen director Harry Christophers.

“The title comes from a line in Mundy’s Vox Patris. The text is from the Song of Songs, that part of the Bible regarded in Victorian times as too saucy to be read. It’s a very sensual and erotic poem written as pagan love poetry a few centuries before Christ was born. During Christian times the poem became synonymous with the Virgin Mary.”

All three composers represented in this year’s pilgrimage – William Mundy, Richard Davy, and John Sheppard – have strong connections with Magdalen College. The same is true of Harry Christophers, who sang in the Magdalen choir as a student.

“I was first introduced to Davy in my first year at Magdalen,” Harry explains. “In fact we recorded his song, Ah Mine Heart Remember Thee Well. I do indeed “remember thee well”, and straining to reach that top G at the beginning! And my history tutor at Magdalen was David Wulstan, without whom none of us would have realised what a sublime composer Sheppard was.” And there’s a further Oxford connection. When the pilgrimage reaches Christ Church Cathedral on Saturday evening, it’s but a short bus ride for long-term Sixteen singer Sally Dunkley, who lives in the city.

“I was actually part of the Sixteen’s first concert,” Sally tells me when we meet up. “It’s amazing to think about that all these years later [the group was formed 34 years ago]. It was very exciting indeed: there was a prototype concert at Magdalen, then the official debut of The Sixteen in London. I’ve sung in the group quite a lot during all the years in between: it’s been lovely to be more available in the last five or six years.”

Sally doesn’t just sing with The Sixteen. She helps run the choral workshops which often precede the group’s concerts – there’s a workshop in Oxford on Saturday morning. And she also prepares performing editions of the music to be sung. This brings up delicious, romantic thoughts of Sally triumphantly deciphering a John Sheppard score – scrawled, no doubt, by the light of a flickering candle when he was Magdalen’s director of music in the 16th century.

“I always think of the film The Name of the Rose, where there was that wonderful footage of the monks in the scriptorium beavering away,” Sally laughs. “That’s what I like to imagine. But, crucially, there are no autograph manuscripts by most of these composers – the destruction in England over the Reformation period was enormous. The only reason why we have music by John Sheppard to sing is down to three anthologists who looked back on his music, presumably with great affection, in the 1580s and 90s. Those are our sources for most of it, not the composer’s manuscripts, alas.”

Much of Sally’s musical life has been spent working within a choir. But has she ever fancied stepping out on to the operatic stage as a soloist? “I do carry out solo work occasionally – Bach in particular. It took me a long time to find the confidence to do things like that. But I’ve never had any operatic ambition: I’d be hopeless on stage because I’m renowned for falling over anything in sight that I can possibly fall over. I can’t walk and sing at the same time, it’s that bad!”

The Sixteen: Choral Pilgrimage 2014
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
Saturday, 8pm
Tickets: 01865 305305 or www.ticketsoxford.com.
Choral workshop: www.thesixteen.com