Soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, photographed on Feb. 14.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
A meeting of a mutual admiration society convened in Toronto on Feb. 14.
“If Aaron Davis is doing something, I want to be involved in it,” said the soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee. To which the composer Davis responded, “Measha can sing pretty well anything.”
The two frequent collaborators sat on a couch together at a west-end Toronto art gallery chatting up their new album, Zombie Blizzard, a song cycle of seven concert arias for voice, jazz trio and brass orchestra, based on Margaret Atwood’s 2020 book of poetry, Dearly.
“These are compositions that make perfect sense,” Brueggergosman-Lee said about the unlikely project, which obliterates genre lines. “It’s good math, and Aaron just paints this text, which is already iconic, because it is Margaret Atwood.”
Davis, a pianist/composer/arranger often associated with chanteuse Holly Cole, chimed in: “There’s something about Margaret’s poetry that is so intelligent and so unsentimental. When she writes something like, ‘I miss you all dearly,’ she means it. She is the opposite of trite.”
Atwood, a friend of Brueggergosman-Lee, was in Mexico finishing her next novel, presumably with face blushing and ears burning. It’s a shame she missed the Valentine’s Day love-in.
Themes of love, loss and the passage of time thread Zombie Blizzard. The inspiration material, Dearly, is Atwood’s first poetry collection published since the 2019 death of her husband, the writer Graeme Gibson. (Her collection of short fiction from a year ago, Old Babes in the Wood, includes a story titled Widows.)
The album from Davis and Brueggergosman-Lee (and the Hannaford Street Silver Band) comes with a separate set of Atwood’s spoken-word readings. The project’s apocalyptic title is derived from her poems Zombie and Blizzard. The former is a consideration of poetry’s ghost-like presence in the world today.
How many poems about
the dead one who isn’t dead,
the lost one who semi-persists,
nudging hungrily up
through the plant litter, the waste paper,
scratching against the window?
Poetry, then, is the zombie – the pentameter monster that cannot be killed, presumably because it is already dead. This new album – and another one released recently by the poet Robert Priest, People Like You and Me – is the zombie scratching at the window, hoping sung poetry will attract some attention.
Zombie Blizzard will be released next month.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
“I’m a recitalist, so I know there’s nothing else like this,” said Brueggergosman-Lee, 46, resplendent in long braids, red velvet gown and orange blouse. “What we’ve made doesn’t exist elsewhere.”
Though Brueggergosman-Lee was recently granted a Governor-General’s Award for her lifetime achievement in classical music, she’s not tied down to Berlioz, Wagner or any of the other composers she calls “the dead white guys.” Her 2012 album I’ve Got a Crush on You, for example, collects duets with people such as comedic actor Martin Short, selected from the songbooks of Feist, Joni Mitchell and the Gershwins.
The seeds of Zombie Blizzard were planted during the making of The Measha Series, a four-part online concert program produced in 2022 with help from Davis (and the Canada Council). One episode starred Atwood reciting a suite of her unpublished poetry. From there, Brueggergosman-Lee and Davis decided to create musical versions of seven poems from Dearly.
It wasn’t easy. For one thing, they decided there would be no edits to the poems to make them more singable.
Ms. Brueggergosman-Lee and composer Aaron Davis.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
“For Digging Up the Scythians, Aaron set up a tonal world that sounds like we are at war,” Brueggergosman-Lee said, quoting a line about warriors tattooed up to the armpits and buried with their weapons.
“Try writing a melody to that,” Davis said, adding that composing the music was like solving a puzzle. “I tried to keep some of the edginess and dissonance that is implicit in a lot of these poems, and still have the emotional heft they carry.”
Brueggergosman-Lee and Davis both recently lost parents. The singer said the video for the ballad Dearly – as in, the dearly departed – is “shamelessly heart-wrenching,” and that the interpretation of the poem was a celebration of collective sorrow.
It’s an old word, fading now.
Dearly did I wish.
Dearly did I long for.
I loved him dearly.
The scores are complex. Brueggergosman-Lee described the opening motif for Princess Clothing in particular as “crazy.” Musically, Davis looked at Stravinsky’s poetically inspired Three Japanese Lyrics from 1913.
“I didn’t cop anything at all,” he said. “But I did immerse myself into the world of tense harmonies and polytonalities.”
On March 3, the album received its world premiere at Toronto’s Jane Mallet Theatre. The semi-official genre classification for Zombie Blizzard is classical crossover/jazz. As such, radio promotion will target classical, jazz and campus stations. It is, for sure, a bit out of the box. At one point, Brueggergosman-Lee wondered aloud, “Will JAZZ-FM play this?,” referring to the Toronto public radio station CJRT-FM (branded as JAZZ.FM91).
One of the boldface types who showed up for the sneak preview of the album held at the OHSO Studio gallery last month was Jaymz Bee, host of the station’s eclectically programmed Saturday night show, Jazz Gone Wild.
He produced Priest’s People Like You and Me album, and said he would absolutely play Zombie Blizzard over the air. “If you’re going mash up classical music and Margaret Atwood, that’s right up my alley. Measha knows how to tackle something that should be sensitive and difficult, but she makes it look effortless.”
And about her unpredictable musical directions?
“It confuses a lot of people,” he acknowledged, “but it entertains most of them.”
Brueggergosman-Lee’s projects are all over the map, literally and figuratively. She’s among three singers on the forthcoming Known to Dreamers: Black Voices in Canadian Art Song, an album that sets texts by writers André Alexis and Owen Dodson to music. With Toronto’s Opera Atelier in April, the soprano stars in a mixed program of Henry Purcell and Reynaldo Hahn, created specifically for her.
She was part of the new Hemingway-inspired opera The Old Man and the Sea by Italian composer Paola Prestini and Canadian librettist Royce Vavrek that premiered at Arizona State University last fall. Because Slovenian director Karmina Silec curiously wanted Brueggergosman-Lee to sing while on a treadmill, a bit of extra work was involved. “I’m what you call, ‘yoga fit,’ so I don’t love walking,” she said. “But one of the reasons I accepted that gig was because it was hot – Arizona in November.”
The Halifax-based star is set to star opposite Canadian actor François Arnaud in the operatic film Open Air, created by James Darrah and Christopher Rountree for Long Beach Opera – in Southern California, as it happens.
“I’m all about the warm weather,” she said, her laughter filling the room.
Which brought us to Zombie Blizzard, which in turns brings Brueggergosman-Lee to Ontario in the winter months. Can we see her cold weather appearance as a testament to the passion she has for the project?
“Yes, that’s proof,” she agreed. “I love this album that much.”
Zombie Blizzard, then, bringing poetry and Brueggergosman-Lee in from the cold.