In Chor Leoni's Boundless concert, Don Macdonald's High Flight honours the life and loss of a Second World War air-force pilot
Six-movement composition features in choir’s annual Remembrance Day program curated by artistic director Erick Lichte
Chor Leoni. Photo by Phil Jack
Chor Leoni presents Boundless at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church on November 10 at 7:30 pm, and November 11 at 2 pm and 5 pm
“OH! I HAVE slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings”, writes 19-year-old Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr. in his poem High Flight. He completed the sonnet and mailed it to his parents in September 1941, three months before his death during World War II.
At once joyous in tone and bittersweet due to its author’s fate, the poem struck a chord with readers, and has since played an impactful role in honouring and remembering the lives lost to war. Eighty-two years later, High Flight is the basis of a new six-movement choral work of the same name by Don Macdonald, Chor Leoni’s current composer-in-residence.
“It may not have necessarily been there in his original intent for sure, but he sort of unwittingly was writing his own eulogy, to me,” Macdonald says of Magee. “It is the most beautiful and profound piece of poetry that explores what it is like to be above the clouds, and it takes us to the heavens with him.”
High Flight marks its world premiere at Chor Leoni’s 32nd annual Remembrance Day concert, Boundless, held at the St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church downtown. The 20-minute piece, performed by the choir alongside pianist Tina Chang and cellist Jonathan Lo, is the focal point of a program curated by Chor Leoni’s artistic director Erick Lichte.
Macdonald, who used to perform with Chor Leoni in the 1990s, is in his third and final year as the choir’s composer-in-residence. The singer-composer, whose diverse list of credits spans works for theatre, dance, choir, and film, has produced seven pieces during the residency—plus High Flight, which compares in length to six additional songs.
Don Macdonald.
While musical treatments of High Flight by other artists tend to lean more celebratory, Macdonald’s piece is a listening journey. It starts with the wide-eyed innocence of Magee’s youth, evolves as he encounters the destruction of war, and ends with notes of respect and appreciation for Magee’s sacrifices.
“Remembrance Day performances can sometimes take us to this place of despair,” Macdonald reflects. “And there are places within the poetry, or within my six movements, that allow us to go there, but I didn’t want to leave people with that. I definitely wanted to leave them with a sense of awe in what this young man was able to accomplish.”
Boundless is the 11th Remembrance Day offering Lichte has led with Chor Leoni since assuming his role as artistic director at the beginning of 2013. The November 10 and 11 performances take on a different tone from the usual audience interaction and upbeat energy that characterize the group’s concerts. Applause is held until the end of the final piece out of respect, and the energy in the venue is particularly intimate.
“There’s a palpable sense of the audience feeling this music together as a unit through the silences,” Lichte says. “And it’s in the intensity of the listening—you can feel it in your skin when 300 or 500 people are listening intently to something. That is a different room than just an empty room that’s quiet.”
Among the other works on the program is the Canadian premiere of Patrick Vu’s “A Golden Day”, and an arrangement by Chor Leoni member Keith Sinclair of “Vimy Ridge” by Alberta-based singer-musician Lizzy Hoyt. Along with Chang and Lo, organist Angelique Po and trumpeter Katherine Evans offer musical accompaniment to the choir’s 70 voices.
“What we try to do every year, and especially this year, is to honour those that have served,” Lichte shares. “But through that honouring, we look squarely and deeply into the face of war and create a place where we understand that there are alternatives. The cost that these people have given, it’s insurmountable. It needs to be celebrated, but we need to do better as a humanity so that people like John Magee, who Don has written about, those lives are not lost to us. The world is so much richer with them with us. And so it’s looking at some of these things in microcosm, but giving ourselves hope in our capacity to have empathy, to feel, and to possibly choose a different path.”
Chor Leoni. Photo by David Cooper
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