Sing On! Anniversary Series: Commonwealth Chorale

Branching outward from a prominent thoroughfare, Commonwealth Chorale sings on

In this installment of our “Sing On!” anniversary series, GBCC spoke with Marie Baroni Allen and Bruce Hale of Commonwealth Chorale, which was founded in 1976 by Barbara Chen and Marjorie Toledo as the Newton Choral Society. Marie is a longtime member of the chorale and has helped to keep the organization strong in many other roles, including serving as its president. Bruce is a newer member of the chorale, and both he and Marie are currently active with the ensemble’s strategic planning committee. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. (Published: February 2026)

Alison LaRosa (General Manager, GBCC, she/her): How did each of you come to be connected with Commonwealth Chorale?

Marie Baroni Allen (she/her): I am not quite a founder, but almost! In 1978 I joined the chorus. Their first concert was in 1977. Basically, there was no other gig in town. There was the Highland Glee Club, and there were church choirs, but there was no community chorus, per se. Having sung all my life, I wanted to look around to see what there was, and found through a newspaper article that they had just begun this chorus. And so, I joined up.

Bruce Hale (he/him): For me, it had been a while since I had been part of a chorus. I’d been singing all my early life, and I came to a spot about three years ago where I could fit a chorus back into my life, and I ran into an ad for Commonwealth Chorale. The rehearsal venue is not too far from my house, so I figured I’ll give it a try. Worst case scenario, I thought, if I don’t think it’s a good fit for me, I can leave. But here I am!

AL: Was there anything in particular about the mission of the chorus that really resonated with you initially?

MBA: Well, for me, it was simply the fact that Newton should have a chorus. They had a symphony orchestra, and I felt they should have a chorus.

BH: And for me, it wasn’t the mission specifically, but the reason I’ve stayed is because of the interesting music that we perform. And the collegiality of the group. The people are really nice.

AL: I’d love to hear from each of you about one of your favorite performing experiences with the chorale.

BH: One of my favorites in the past three years was when we did Carmina Burana. That was March of last year. That was fun, because we partnered with the Rivers Symphony and the Wellesley Middle School chorus for that. It was in Regis College’s auditorium – a nice venue. It was just a really interesting mix of people there, and it was a pretty packed house, so it was a lot of fun.

MBA: I had a tough time picking… One of the things that was significant for us was when we sang in Carnegie Hall. We sang with the Boston Philharmonic. That was a really special, wonderful occurrence. That was, maybe, twenty years ago? And then, there have been some wonderful performances that were more local. We did the Verdi Requiem in conjunction with Metropolitan Chorale not long ago. Another very exciting one was when we performed Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony in Sanders Theatre, with orchestra. How could you not like Vaughan Williams?

AL: So true. So, we love talking about the high points, but any organization that’s been around for fifty years has come up against some challenging times, and so I’d be curious to hear from your perspective, what have been some of the challenges, and how did the chorus get through them?

MBA: I would say, over the past fifty years, the most significant challenge we’ve had is the current. And it’s because we have a lot of overlapping events. There was COVID. And during COVID, we had to maintain the spirit and the drive of the organization. Not easy! And after COVID, we did lose membership. There were some people that just never came back to the chorus. The number of members, in part, drives our financial model. In addition to that, we saw that we needed some younger singers. There was a stable of us, like myself, who have been in the chorus for a long time. And so we saw a need for younger singers to be able to move forward in the future. In addition to that, our director of 43 years (David Carrier) retired. Our new director (Michael Driscoll) has been with us for about four years. And one of the things we need now, because of all of those events, is a new financial model. That’s a real challenge – to determine how to sustain the chorus, financially. Because choruses are expensive. One of the things I say very often to people is, running our chorus – and we’re all volunteers – is like running a small business. And it takes a lot to run a small business.

AL: That’s quite a tenure for David Carrier – 43 years. What were some of the highlights of working with David?

MBA: First of all, David is a fabulous musician. He’s very adept at orchestral conducting, as well as choral conducting. In addition to that, he grew up with us. He started with Commonwealth Chorale as the accompanist when he was maybe, 26, 27? He was really good to work with.

(on the current membership)

MBA: We now have people who travel quite a distance to sing with Commonwealth Chorale. That was one of the reasons we changed the name from Newton Choral Society. Grafton, Shrewsbury, Easton/Canton area…

BH: Winthrop, Acton. Yeah, pretty far-flung.

AL: Would you say that’s changed anything about the chorus in terms of the energy, or has it changed how you make your decisions around where you perform or rehearse, or…

MBA: We changed our rehearsal space so it is T-accessible. There are a lot of younger people in Boston who could take the T to somewhere, but it’s too expensive to go to chorus rehearsals all the time with an Uber. The other change is the chorus has become significantly more… I’d call it competent. The level at which you have to be able to sight-read and sing and perform is much higher than it was thirty years ago. It was good to go out into the countryside and look for other people who had strong choral backgrounds and musical capabilities.

BH: I view the geographic diversity of our membership not so much as something that we have to grapple with, but as a commitment to the chorus, and the value that people derive from it by coming from such great distance. As I said, I auditioned a few years ago and joined because it was near my house and I could fit it into my schedule. I’m very impressed with the people that come from Easton and Acton. They make the commitment, because there is something of value to them in participating with this choral group. I think that’s a testament to the group itself.

AL: What would you consider to have been a particularly important moment, whether it was a performance or some other aspect, of Commonwealth Chorale’s history?

BH: What I thought of immediately is a concert we did in May of 2024 called “The Dream Unfinished”. That was a very powerful performance, in my opinion. It was hard to get through the music during rehearsals without breaking up. We pulled it together for the performance, of course. But it was a very America-focused concert: sort of the original ideas of America and what needs to be done still, as told from a number of different historical perspectives: Florence Price, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan. And this was May of 2024, leading up to the presidential election, of course. So it was quite powerful. It’s out on YouTube if anyone wants to listen to it.

MBA: I think one of the things about our current director, Mike Driscoll, is he’s excellent at programming unique programs. It’s easy to have a program that’s, say, the Mozart Requiem and a Bach piece. That doesn’t take as much thought and or creativity as putting these other, shorter pieces together in a sequence. He spends a lot of time thinking about what pieces will we do, and how will they be sequenced within a concert.

BH: And he throws in unusual pieces that spark different ideas, or takes an idea from the main work that’s being performed and expands it or changes it a little bit. So, very creative programming.

AL: I’d love to hear from you both about Commonwealth Chorale’s involvement with the community. I leave that very open-ended in terms of how you would define “community.”

MBA: We define community in our strategic plan as choristers, instrumentalists, and audience.

For those who cannot attend our concerts, we have a special outreach program. So, we consider all of that as community.

AL: Tell me more about the outreach program.

MBA: The outreach program is a subset of 25 people who perform at retirement communities or nursing homes. So these are people who would not be coming to our concerts, but who are avid music lovers. We do performances at six different places a year. And the music, rather than being as formal as our concert music, also includes Broadway tunes and folk songs. It always ends with a sing-along. When we do the sing-along, we stand among the audience, grouped with them. And that brings a sense of community between the two groups. That’s a very interesting and important program that’s been going on for about forty years.

BH: And when I think of community, I’m definitely thinking about the audience, and who are we reaching, who are we trying to reach. I love the fact that we have our most recent concerts out on YouTube. They’re accessible for other people to enjoy, in total or in part. So I consider that to be part of our community as well. But one of the interesting things for me as a member of the chorus is how we partner with other musical organizations and other musical performers. So, for our concerts, we typically will have at least one or two soloists come in and sing with us, and they’re different people all the time, so we are connecting with different professionals. So we have this interesting network of people that we’ve worked with over the years, and I view that as powerful from a performance standpoint.

MBA: We have a young singers’ fund, so anyone who is in the chorus who is 30 years old or younger does not pay dues. In the past, we’ve had an artist-in-residence program. And we’ve had a master class program, which was specifically for high school students in Newton. We are also members of the Newton Cultural Alliance, which supports Newton cultural events. Over the years we have flexed in terms of which aspects of our community we’re highly supporting. And part of that is financial. You can only afford to do so many things. But over the years, we’ve had a lot of programs for the community.

AL: I have to ask, representing the Choral Consortium, I’d like to hear your thoughts on how has being a member of the Greater Boston Choral Consortium community played a part in your chorale?

MBA: Newton Choral Society’s involvement goes back to the beginning of the consortium, with Anne Marie (Lindquist). Over the years, as we have grown and as the consortium has grown, it’s become more important. It was an excellent place to share our director posting, for example. And the other thing is, I’ve always liked how they have focused on choral issues, and had speakers or discussions that are very specific to choruses.

AL: So, I know that Commonwealth Chorale has a particular emphasis on performing works by Massachusetts composers. I’d love to hear a bit more about how that emphasis came about.

MBA: We’ve always commissioned works from local composers. When we changed our name to Commonwealth Chorale (in 2016), one of the reasons that name was chosen is that Commonwealth Avenue runs through Newton and out to other communities. There was a lot of time and energy put into what the new name should be. I have lists of probably a hundred possible choices! And it took a long time to figure it out, but we did. We felt that aspect, the commissioning, should be reflected in the name. We’ve done works by Danny Pinkham, Randall Thompson. We’ve had works commissioned from Patricia Van Ness, James Woodman, and Alan Fletcher… Carson Cooman, including a full-length oratorio of his that we did for David Carrier’s final concert. And recently we worked with Kevin Siegfried, who’s in Andover. He is nationally known for his folk song arrangements. We commissioned him to do an arrangement of “I’ll Fly Away.” And we’ve performed works by two New England Conservatory students. One was Bosba Pan, who now goes by the name Bosba. And then we had beautiful pieces by Charles Tarver. 

BH: And Florence Price also was educated at NEC. Her music is seeing a much-needed renaissance, or discovery, I should say. Mike (Driscoll) has done some arrangements of Florence Price’s music that we have sung.

MBA: Oh, and then we did Amy Beach’s Great Mass, which hadn’t been performed in Boston for something like sixty years. But one other thing, another niche that Commonwealth Chorale has, is presenting underperformed works. So, Amy Beach is one example. Another example was (Joseph) Jongen’s Mass in honor of Saint-Sacrement. He’s Belgian. He wrote it in ’45 in memory of his brother, who died in the war. And it was, like, this big hit all over Europe. And suddenly, it disappeared. Nobody was playing it. It’s a beautiful piece of music. We recently performed a piece by Marianna Martines, who was the first woman to belong to the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna composer group. But when you say her name, most people don’t have any clue who she is.

BH: We’ve also done some of (Jonathan) Dove’s pieces. It was a very interesting companion to Bach’s Magnificat. And in our next concert we’re doing two pieces by a Brazilian composer, Nunes Garcia. 

MBA: And then there’s Cecilia McDowall. We did her Laudate. That was nice. If you go to Europe, they all know Cecilia McDowall. But in the U.S., she’s not particularly well known, but she writes beautiful music. Our performance was an East Coast premiere. She was so happy that it was finally going to be performed here that she gave us the performance rights – we didn’t have to pay her for them.

AL: Fifty years is an incredible milestone to be celebrating. What is your take on why it is that you think that Commonwealth Chorale is still here, fifty years later?

MBA: The volunteer leadership has been excellent; the presidents have been fabulous (laughs)! But the other thing is, everybody in our chorus is really dedicated. They’re dedicated at all levels. They’re dedicated to the music, and they’re dedicated to having the existence of the chorus. Another thing that we did, which I consider very important to allow us to reach fifty years, is that in 1999 we created an endowment fund. Over the years, we’ve grown it little by little: “inch by inch” as the Three Stooges would say. I think that’s very important, philosophically and psychologically, to know that we’d be able to go into the future because we would always have a guaranteed pot of money.

BH: I would echo what Marie said about the group itself: the group dynamics, the membership. The commitment that people have to the music, to the group and to one another, is pretty important, as we spoke earlier about the geographic diversity of our membership and the commitment that people make to attend rehearsals and performances. It’s very impressive. And of course, the bass section (laughs)!

AL: So now if we think ahead to the next fifty years (because you know you gotta get those next fifty years!), what do you think is going to be different or the same about the chorus?

MBA: I think about with choruses in general – and it will apply to this chorus – what we’ll see is concert programming which is not only choral performance. Performances which include more visual aspects. With all of these people coming out of social media, and wedded to their cameras, I don’t think in another fifty years people are going to be content coming to a concert, sitting and looking at a group of people just standing still. One of the things Mike has been doing, for example, is having a mix of some instrumental pieces that fit into the program with the choral pieces. I think there’s going to be more and more of that.

BH: Yeah, I think mixed media, creative programming. I’m already seeing more… concise programming. 20 or 30 years ago, if I was in a chorus, we would do a concert for two hours with an intermission in the middle. Most of the time now we are doing an hour, hour and 15, which is much more manageable for the performers and for the audience, frankly. So it’s a nice type of a performance that is concise, well-tailored, and interesting and engaging to the audience. And we already have this digital presence with our YouTube channel. I do see us finding ways to make more use of digital media, outside of the context of a choral performance. You could envision a future where the connection to the broader community for any particular chorus, including ours, is not just three concerts a year. But some other media, some other format, some other type of engagement.

(on what the founders of Commonwealth Chorale might find most interesting about the chorus today)

MBA: Since this is our fiftieth year, I went back and contacted the two founders of the chorus – Barbara Chen and Marjorie Toledo – for a blurb for our program book. And what they said was, “When we set out to found what would ultimately become Commonwealth Chorale, we never could have imagined it would grow to include the breadth and quality of talent that it has, let alone still be serving the community fifty years later. We simply wanted to start a group where we and others could enjoy performing beautiful music.” They started their group taking advice from leading choral conductors, submitting articles to the Graphic (which at the time was a newspaper in Newton), and looking at rehearsal spaces. Those two women are so excited that their idea, that mostly came out of Barbara’s kitchen, is still in existence.

AL: What is it about your association with Commonwealth Chorale that you’re most proud of?

BH: Well, there’s certainly the musicality of it all: the musical growth that it affords, even in just a few short years as I’ve gotten back into choral singing. But I would say that it is really the connection to this group of musicians. There are a lot of really interesting and talented people in this group.

MBA: I think the best aspect is the competent level of musicianship. We have a lot of people whose educational background is music performance or music education. We have quite a few former or current music teachers. And that changes the level of the chorus. It’s theoretically a community chorus, but it’s more of a semi-professional chorus in that we have all these people who have spent their whole lives studying music. So that’s made a difference, as well as the competence of the directors that we’ve had: David, and now Mike. That makes me very proud to be a member of Commonwealth Chorale.

AL: What advice would you give to folks if they were sitting around their kitchen table thinking, I want to start a chorus?

MBA: I have a lot of advice, having lived through so many events during the last fifty years. But I do think in this era, which is different from the era when this chorus was started, the best thing a group can do is find a niche. For example, Coro Allegro. That’s a perfect example of an organization that’s been highly successful because it has a niche and a niche market. And it’s more difficult, I think, for what I’ll call “general purpose” choruses to find that niche. But for us, one of those niches is the Commonwealth composer connection. I think this will become more important, because we have so many choruses in Greater Boston. Some distinguishing factor is needed. 

MBA: And then, you really need a financial plan. I don’t believe a lot of people understand how much money it takes to run a chorus, even if all you’re doing is having an accompanist, a director, a space in which to rehearse, and a space in which to perform. It takes money. And, making certain that you have substantial administrative support. Whether it’s through all volunteers, who have to have certain skill sets that help with organizational development, or have paid administrative support, which is difficult to afford. I think this is probably true of most choruses, that you’re either spending your money on programming, or marketing, or instrumentalists. When you want to get an administrative assistant, you have to start thinking about taking money from those pots. How do you do that? You still have to pay your conductors, and your section leaders, and your soloists, and your accompanist. It’s tough. But without a niche, a financial plan, and an administrative support plan, you’re not going to have a successful chorus.

BH: My advice for starting a chorus, never having done that before… I come from the perspective of someone who would go see a chorus perform, and I would want them to do something that’s interesting and fun for them. Don’t just sit down with Handel’s Messiah and say, we’re going to perform that, unless it’s a passion of yours. Sure, do it if it’s a passion, but, do something interesting. Do something new, do something fresh, and have fun with it. Find what makes you you. Other than that, listen to Marie! Because she knows how this is done.

AL: I think that is excellent advice to end on. Thank you, both, for sharing your story.

Commonwealth Chorale’s next concert in its 50th anniversary season is March 8, 2026, at Second Church in Newton. Click here for more information.