When I began writing about the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, two decades ago, we were in a pre-streaming era when today’s choral scholars were perhaps not even born, and when the parents of the choristers might easily have been students there themselves. Yet in the history of St John’s – whether choir, chapel or college – those two decades represent a mere slither of time, during which such a prestigious choir might easily have chosen to remain comfortably complacent in its revered reputation. Yet that’s never been the St John’s way, and under current Director of Music Christopher Gray, the choir happily feels as forward-looking as the cutting-edge labs that circle the city’s historic core in ever-increasing numbers. As if to underscore the point, Gray’s first album with the ensemble he took over in 2023 is of contemporary music. ‘That won’t be the only direction of travel,’ he reassures me, not that justification for a modern programme is needed. ‘I think it’s important that we record early music as well, and everything in between.’

We’ll come back to musical eras and styles, but first I ask Gray, as we look around at the early 16th-century court off which we’re sitting, what he considers to be the role today, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, of the director of music of a collegiate choir. ‘It’s many things,’ is his reply. ‘Looking first at the music, I think you need to understand and know your group, and the repertoire that’s out there and which composers it will be nourishing for that group to work with. Who will provide meaningful, substantial works that will excite and engage them? If it excites and engages the choir, it’s going to excite and engage the listener too. That might be Palestrina one day, then James MacMillan the next, Stanford the next, and Purcell after that. It’s a kaleidoscopic range of styles. And, you know, inevitably, some of those capture a certain cohort a little bit more than others (and maybe me, as well), but it will always be eclectic.’

Listening to a take: from left – engineer David Hinitt, producer Adrian Peacock, assistant producer Joseph Wicks and Christopher Gray himself (photography: Isabelle Freeman)

How important is that tapestry of music ancient and modern for singers in developing their style? ‘They learn so much from it all. We do a lot of plainchant here. And the Anglican chant psalm singing is extraordinary. We’ve recently taken to doing it entirely unconducted, and that’s not primarily to help their listening skills, it’s because the singers have to take responsibility for the emotional journey. So if verse three of the psalm is suddenly a shift from angry to compassionate, they can’t look to the conductor to show them that – they have to work it out and deliver it themselves.’ Such team telepathy is something that pays dividends when the same instinct – or, as Gray puts it, ‘nimbleness emotionally’ – is applied to wider repertoire. ‘Some of the pieces that we’ve been recording have such sharp contrasts, and the choir is so much like a racing car that the singers are very good at navigating those chicanes.’

It’s the sessions for those recordings that have this July morning brought me to Cambridge, and it would be hard to have programmed a more searing emotional journey for Gray’s first album. Called ‘Lament & Liberation’, it opens with ‘Deus, Deus meus’ fromRoxanna Panufnik’s Westminster Mass (1997) – ‘the plaintive longing of a soul in pain reaching out to God for rescue’, as Gray puts it in the booklet notes; now adding, ‘a treble’s voice asking, “Is God out there?” in this empty space into which he’s singing’. This powerful opening leads into a triptych, Echoes in Time (2023), by Joanna Marsh, which sets poems by Malcolm Guite: ‘The darkness established by the Panufnik is broken by Marsh’s first piece, The Hidden Light, coming into the world.’ The album then features a hauntingly textured work by Helena Paish, one-time chorister under Gray at Truro Cathedral (in fact, one of his inaugural intake of girl choristers there): The Annunciation (2024)is a setting of Edwin Muir’s poem of the same name. After this comes another new composition, Ecce ego Ioannes (2024), written by Martin Baker for senior organ scholar Alexander Robson. This piece prefigures the album’s second triptych, Cantos sagrados (1989) by Sir James MacMillan, a powerful work that addresses the brutal experience of those living under political oppression in Latin America, including the disappearance of individuals and the execution of a prisoner by an unwilling soldier seeking forgiveness for his act – heartbreaking horrors transfigured by the interweaving of words from the liturgy. The album closes with a work by Dobrinka Tabakova, Turn our captivity, O Lord (2022), originally written for The Sixteen: ‘It fits perfectly, “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy,”’ says Gray, recalling part of the text. ‘It comes out of the MacMillan, and just turns it into something a little more positive for the end.’

To return to psalm singing, what could better prepare an ensemble for such emotional immersion than daily engagement with those scriptural meditations, embracing as they do timeless issues from fear and conflict to doubt and anxiety, as well as gratitude and joy. This is all sung by children, some of whom are barely into double figures in terms of age. How does Gray help them understand such texts? ‘That’s most of the rehearsals, because they’re very quick with the notes,’ he says. ‘Some of the Psalms are straightforward: they just praise God; but some of them really go to the depths of humankind, of turmoil, and of trying to make head or tail of a difficult situation. And we discuss that, and how it’s as relevant now as it was 3000 years ago. These are human emotions that haven’t really changed in that primal sense. We work out how we relate to those emotions, and we make them ours. Every pair of verses is discussed and heavily interpreted, and we take the listener down a specific road with it.’ The rhythm of St John’s choral life supports such a daily deep dive. ‘The children have an hour every morning, but then the full choir has an hour before every service. And that’s unusual. Most cathedrals have 20 minutes or so. Here we can easily spend 20 or 25 minutes on a short psalm, discussing each verse; and, of course, that then translates into the rest of the repertoire.’ This focus on the Psalms is something he says he inherited from his predecessor, Andrew Nethsingha (Director of Music, 2007-22). ‘It was one of the reasons I applied for this job,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve always loved this choir, like many people. I feel the particular type of musicianship suits my natural kind of habitat.’

Nethsingha would likewise often refer to inheriting a tradition at St John’s, as did David Hill before him – in fact, all the incumbents have clearly considered themselves custodians of something precious. So how, then, does Gray shape something so cherished in his own image? ‘Everything on the contemporary album is something I’ve taught the choir,’ he says. ‘So it’s all music I’ve done from scratch, in my time. There’s nothing that I have inherited an interpretation of.’ He compares it with much of the Evensong repertoire, where: ‘if I want to make a slight change, I know that the choir has been taught it in a certain way by someone whose interpretation they really value. I think, more than possibly any other choir, this is a choir where you have to respect the heritage because it is so distinctive. It really isn’t like anywhere else. And I was very keen not to accidentally impose my will on it and make it into something that just sounds like “my thing”. So I’ve been going very carefully.

‘Instead of pushing my will forwards, I’ve been trying to understand why they do things in a particular manner, and to meet them part of the way. So, for example, the choir famously sings quite far behind the beat at times. Now, we’ve brought that forward a little bit, and it’s not quite the same as it was. But I didn’t do that by getting very dictatorial and saying, “Please, will you sing on my beat?” – because that’s most other choirs in the country. One of the ways St John’s creates its generous phrasing is by not giving too much on the front of the phrase – just emerging out of the mist with phrases. And even when it is a more incisive lead that you need, they do it in a St John’s incisive way: it’s not narrow and poky, it’s got a depth to it. So I’ve been trying not to lose that.’ Where did that approach come from? ‘I think you hear it in George Guest’s earliest recordings,’ Gray says, referring to the holder of the music director post for four decades from 1951, a period which saw the choir’s reputation on record established. ‘What I hear is a style of singing that doesn’t force itself onto you, but draws you into it. And that, of course, comes from that understanding of what they’re singing about. If you’re looking for the tectonic plate that doesn’t move so much, I would say it’s that meaning-based singing.’

The acoustic of the chapel also plays a crucial role. ‘It can take really quiet singing of a kind that in a cathedral – and certainly in Truro Cathedral [where Gray worked for more than two decades] – would be lost if we sang as quietly as St John’s do. The choir sound, I think, is fashioned in the quieter dynamic range, and then scaled up from there. It’s not fashioned at forte. It’s fashioned at piano, or mezzo-piano. And then we try to keep the proportions the same as it goes up.’

To capture that acoustic in the sessions, he’s assembled the choir in the apse, with the stone semicircle acting like a soundboard. ‘I wanted to do something slightly different with the recorded sound on this album, and I thought that in order to capture the sound of the choir, that distinctive sound, you would need to come in reasonably close. There’s a lot of warmth in the sound, and vocal colour, a little bit of a vibrato at times in the trebles, and you don’t get that if you go too far out with the microphones.’ Together with the production team of engineer David Hinitt and producer Adrian Peacock (a partnership behind vast numbers of acclaimed choral records) he experimented until everyone was happy. Situating the choir in the apse also enables him to have all the singers standing together, rather than communicating across an aisle.

Having discussed with Gray the role of a music director in the 21st century, I wonder about that of the choir itself. ‘The college takes its custodianship of the choir very seriously,’ he tells me. ‘It knows it has a duty to protect this little part of the nation’s heritage entrusted to its care, and it could not be more committed to doing that. It wants to maintain the choir in an authentic way. This is quite a traditional college in many ways – obviously pioneering, with cutting-edge research, but actually, in the same way as we have the Eagle Gate and the Bridge of Sighs, we have George Gilbert Scott’s chapel and the choir, and those are all to be treasured. That aside, it’s very important that the choir isn’t just a museum piece. And so the choir connects with the current 950 or so people studying at St John’s through, firstly, Evensong. People like coming to Evensong. There’s a good student presence – not hundreds, but it’s something people take pride in. Compline is very popular too – we can get a lot of people, maybe 100 to 150, at 10pm, and we do that maybe three times a term with just the lower voices, as it’s a bit late for the children. That’s not open to the public, so those people are all from the college. The Advent carol services are obviously a very significant thing, and we prioritise members of the college in being able to have the free tickets for those, and for the Epiphany carol services and the Lent meditation. We try to serve the community internally as best we can while being authentic. Commissioning new music has been a big part of what the choir has done for decades. I think the community takes great pride in that – that this is a choir that brings new works of art into being.’

When commissioning new works, as he did in three cases on this album, what does he look for in a composer? In the case of Marsh, ‘Her voice is sophisticated, but also accessible. I think we need music that is attractive on first listening, but also rewards repeated listening; and I think her music sits very much in that camp. I also talked to her about how she could write something that resonates with people who are 20 years old, and with what’s on their mind, in a place like this, in 2024.’ The Guite poems she chose were integral to how she did that. ‘There’s one that King Charles had made quite famous, called “Refugee”. It looks at the Holy Family as people who are displaced from their homes after Jesus’s birth, and it makes that link in a reasonably subtle way. It also talks about Herod: “But every Herod dies, and comes alone / To stand before the Lamb upon the throne” – the idea that there is justice for dictators and that this baby, who starts off as safe beneath the steeple and cozy in his crib, becomes the Lamb on the throne judging King Herod. So the tables are turned – and there’s such resonance with some of the authoritarian figures in the world today. I don’t think it’s our job …’ – he reaches for the right phrase. ‘We have to be careful not to say more than it’s appropriate for us to say. But I think that just highlighting resonance like that is a really good and valuable thing to do.’ The third work in Marsh’s triptych, Still to Dust, a reflection for Ash Wednesday, addresses environmental concerns with similarly subtle impact. ‘And for the girls in the choir,’ concludes Gray, Marsh ‘is a role model – a successful female composer in a world that’s just correcting itself in that direction.’

It’s only three years since St John’s took that path itself, with female voices now an established part as both choristers and altos. ‘Musically, I think it’s working extremely well,’ affirms Gray. ‘As a boy’s voice starts to change, at maybe 12, 13, 14 years old, they stop being a treble and start to develop their new voice. Girls also do that. They go from being a treble to being a soprano or a mezzo-soprano. People don’t talk about that change as much, but I think that as they get towards 12 or 13, boys’ and girls’ voices start to diverge. But before that, they’re very, very similar or indeed indistinguishable. And so I think it’s all about what it’s always been about here, which is releasing the authentic sound of each individual in the choir. We want all the colour in the voices that they might naturally create if uninhibited – and the girls are bringing their colour to that, just like the boys do. I haven’t seen a single problem between a boy and a girl here: they are like brothers and sisters in the nicest possible way, and I think they’ve integrated seamlessly. I couldn’t be happier with the results. It’s extraordinary, though, as with anything like this, you look back and you kind of think, “How did it take until the 1990s for this journey to start?” But we got there in the end. I would say that in terms of the sound, almost a bigger factor than mixing the girls in with the boys is probably mixing female altos in with the male altos. But I love our alto sound at the moment – there are four altos in the choir this year, and they’re quite different voices, and we get the benefit of all four of those voices as a section, in terms of depth and vocal colour.’

Heading back out into the half-millennium-old architectural masterpiece, I reflect that the new St John’s album is a perfect showcase for this next chapter in the choir’s history, allowing all those colours to be heard in music at times visceral and mystical, challenging and contemplative. It’s an album of our era both musically and thematically, from an institution very much rooted in, yet also transcending, today’s world.