Album Review in Choral Canada's journal Anacrusis

Documenting Devotion: A Review of Canadian Sacred Music by Opus 8

By: Dr. Matthew Emery

This review was first published in Choral Canada's journal Anacrusis (v.43, n.3, Fall/Automne) in November 2025. Permission to share was granted by Choral Canada and the Anacrusis Editorial Committee.

Canadian Sacred Music marks the third recording by the Toronto-based vocal ensemble Opus 8. Whereas the ensemble’s previous albums explored secular works by international composers, this latest release, issued in 2024, focuses exclusively on sacred music by Canadian composers. The repertoire spans approximately the 21st century, with a particular emphasis on works by living composers. The album adopts a reverent tone, maintaining a contemplative sonic atmosphere throughout. Within this overarching religioso ethos, moments of dramatic intensity emerge in The Garden by James Rolfe, while Barrie Cabena’s They That Wait Upon the Lord offers vivid chromatic colour. Jeff Enns’s God Me In My Head features expressive homophonic textures, and Violet Archer’s “The Bell” unfolds in kaleidoscopic contrapuntal layers.

Listeners may be familiar with the music of Eleanor Daley and Ramona Luengen. Daley’s luminous and idiomatic style is exemplified in O Lord, Support Us, a work composed in memory of Elmer Iseler. Luengen’s Nichts Als Ein Atemzug vividly evokes the Rilke text with clarity and nuance.

The intimate forces of Opus 8 perform with warmth, textual clarity, and stylistic sensitivity, adeptly traversing the diverse compositional languages presented on the album. Moments of exquisite solo singing are also featured, notably in Derek Holman’s An Old Song, performed by soprano Katy Clark and tenor Jamie Tuttle. The ensemble performs with a graceful agility to swiftly and evocatively navigate dramatic dynamic ranges, substantive textural changes, and various virtuosic configurations of counterpoint. For many of these compositions, it sounds as if Opus 8 were a tailor-made garment perfectly fit to be sung into the world.

An especially compelling performance can be heard in Stephanie Martin’s Dum Complerentur. This composition is a polyphonic work in which the opening unfolds with an almost algorithmic precision; the musical material blossoms gradually, both harmonically and rhythmically. The initial phrase, scored for upper voices, emerges from a single pitch, with each successive vocal entry entering one pitch higher or lower than the first pitch. This expanding technique is then echoed in the lower voices, with Martin seamlessly eliding phrases as if weaving a tapestry of threaded sound. As the piece develops, Martin expands the rhythmic vocabulary by introducing increasingly faster rhythmic figures, creating a radiant interplay of harmonic and rhythmic warmth that envelops the listener. The composition employs a variety of choral textures, including layering techniques, imitation, and call-and-response motifs, ultimately culminating in a meditative “Alleluia” that closes the work with quiet transcendence.

The album’s pulse is at its most urgent in Tom Bell’s Sinnes Round. Bell sets the poetry of George Herbert in an evocative choral work that opens with a unison ostinato figure in the upper voices. This is juxtaposed with the lower voices, which introduce a slower-moving chordal progression articulated through various inversions. The resulting texture is rich and nuanced, with added note dissonances emerging from the interplay between the persistent ostinato and the more fluid motion of the lower voices. The piece builds toward a climactic, homophonic declamation. This intensity gradually subsides, giving way to a return of the opening ostinato, now rendered with poignant intimacy by a solo alto bringing the work to a contemplative close.

Another standout work on the album is Jeff Enns’s God Be in My Head, a composition that treats harmony as a vehicle for transcendence. Gently flowing melodies give way to unexpected harmonic progressions, rich with added-note sonorities that give the piece a sense of luminous depth. The phrases alternate in vocal leadership, allowing different sections of the ensemble to guide the musical line. This subtle variation contributes to the work’s fluid motion while sustaining the listener’s engagement throughout.

Canadian Sacred Music is a significant contribution to the recorded history of sacred Canadian choral works, some of which are recorded here for the first time. While a few familiar names may come to mind when one thinks of Canadian sacred repertoire, this album broadens that landscape, allowing new voices to emerge and reverberate. Listeners seeking Canadian-specific content will find much to appreciate, as will seasoned choral enthusiasts interested in discovering previously unrecorded works now receiving their first commercial release.

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