Toronto Chamber Choir Blog

March 19, 2026
Author: Hilary Donaldson

Our next concert: Responde Mihi!

Responde Mihi!
March 28, 2026
Church of St. Mary Magdalene
Hilary Donalson, guest conductor

I’m delighted to have the opportunity to present Responde mihi! This concert is a program of compositions spanning 900 years, all connected by the thematic thread of response. From the responsorium genre of Latin plainchant to call-and-response songs from sacred and secular folk traditions, this rich tradition has long inspired composers to explore musical dialogue, contrast, and continuity. I am delighted to be interpreting a programme conceived by the brilliant musicologist and vocalist Sharang Sharma—who is well known to the TCC community—with some alterations and additions by myself. Responde mihi! showcases works that engage with the concept of response through two uninterrupted halves, in which Healey Willan’s Tenebrae Responsories converse with an array of sacred and secular pieces, each reflecting and reframing the underlying narrative.  

Some “response” aspects of this programme unfold in structural or textual aspects of the music, such as the alternation between small group and full choir in the Improperia (Solemn Reproaches), or the semichorus in Benjamin Britten’s A Hymn to the Virgin (composed when he was sixteen) which meditates on the Virgin Mary’s heavenly graces as the full choir exhorts her in prayer.

Of one who is so fair and bright

Velut maris stella,   [Like a star of the sea]

Brighter than the day is light,

Parens et puella:   [Both mother and maiden]

I cry to thee, thou see to me,

Lady, pray thy Son for me,

Tam pia,   [So pure]

That I may come to thee.

Maria!

The programme also assembles a series of excerpts from “Lamentations” settings of the high Renaissance, sweeping through examples by Tallis, Victoria, Lassus, White, and Byrd. The fiery and reproachful words of the prophet Jeremiah unfold across the choir in poignant lines of imitative polyphony inflected by each composer’s compositional and cultural context, from the court of Queen Elizabeth I to the flourishing of the Franco-Flemish school. These selections are interspersed with excerpts drawn from Healey Willan’s Tenebrae Responsories, also liturgical music for Holy Week; we are delighted and honoured to have the opportunity to sing music by Willan in the sanctuary where he served for close to fifty years. In a more worldly but perhaps no less turbulent selection by Monteverdi, a small group of singers takes up the closing madrigal of the Lamento d’Ariana, decrying in bitter terms the falseness of Theseus and calling upon a great host of storms and sea creatures to respond to her, where he will not.

Other aspects of this concert theme are revealed in thematic elements of the music: The song which opens the concert, “The Gift,” by celebrated British Columbia-based Stʼatʼimc and Lil’wat Nation composer Russell Wallace, “is about a community coming together to celebrate a feast, to celebrate “the gift” of traditions and the transmission of knowledge. The choir will call its simple lines to one another across the sanctuary of St. Mary Magdalene, in words that Wallace notes “are not words in any language, but are based on Aboriginal vocables from the western part of North America. The noted song teacher Mary Oyer referred to these as “multi-sense syllables.” All the way through, there is also a noticeable thread capturing in choral strains the ways we call to one another in community, in pilgrimage and shared journey, and even across the boundaries of life and death. The setting by Alice Parker of the American folk / gospel song “A Wayfaring Stranger,” whose lines in gently shifting meter phase and chase one another, not unlike the polyphony of the Lamentations.

Another timely aspect of pilgrimage and shared journey captured by these selections is the liturgical journey of Holy Week, which begins for Protestant and Catholic observers the day following our concert. The Improperia plainchant is associated with the liturgy for Good Friday, when a solemn procession would carry the cross and a priest representing Christ would ask its pointed questions to the gathered congregation. The plainchant has a counterpart in the setting by contemporary Finnish composer Mia Makaroff, which puts Psalm 13 (“How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me forever?) in dialogue with the African-American spiritual “Were You There?”

How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me forever?

How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?

            Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

            Were you there when the sun refused to shine?

In a poignant end to these musical and thematic threads, our concert concludes with a selection from Canadian composer Eleanor Daley’s Requiem. Daley draws from poet Clare Harner’s words of consolation to the grieving: “Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there, I do not sleep.” As music speaks to us across generations and amid the many journeys of life, we are perhaps inevitably met with the grief of one who can never respond again. Daley gives us grace to hear that response in “the thousand winds that blow,” in “the sunlight on ripened grain,” in “the sweet, uplifting rush of silent birds in circled flight.” We welcome you to Responde mihi! – and I hope that this programme will speak to you.

Hilary Seraph Donaldson, guest conductor

For the Toronto Chamber Choir