Volume 26 Issue 2 - October 2020

FEATURE ANATOMY OF A

FEATURE ANATOMY OF A COLLABORATION Edwin Huizinga and Measha Brueggergosman DAV ID PER L M A N Huizinga with Marc Destrubé, violin, Keith Hamm, viola and Judy Hereish, cello in Owen Sound JOHN WHITE Two leisurely phone calls – well an old-fashioned phone call and a Zoom chat, to be precise – bracket this story. The phone call, bright and early on the morning of Saturday, September 19, was with violinist/ composer Edwin Huizinga, calling from Owen Sound, where the 16th annual Sweetwater Festival (Huizinga’s first as artistic director) was well under way. The Zoom chat, just three days later, was also bright and early – with Huizinga again, this time alongside singer Measha Brueggergosman – at a table inside Brueggergosman’s Halifax home, a kitchen behind them, and posttropical storm Teddy, his career as a hurricane having been cancelled ahead of his Maritime tour, whipping aimlessly at the trees outside. I’d been wanting to talk to Huizinga and Brueggergosman for a while about their current collaboration, but had been expecting to have to speak with each of them separately, so it was an unexpected bonus to find out, part way through the Saturday call with Huizinga, that he would be flying to Nova Scotia on the Monday “to finish a project with our amazing fearless Canadian soprano, Measha Brueggergosman.” “Finish the project” sounds optimistic to me. For one thing, Huizinga and Opera Atelier (OA) have been exploring the 24-line poem at the heart of the project (Annunciation to Mary by Bohemian/Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke) for well over two years. For another thing, the piece as described for the upcoming October 28 Koerner Hall “livestreamed and fully staged” production, Something Rich and Strange, is less far along than the vision for it expressed in OA’s pre-pandemic 2020/21 season announcement, where Something Rich and Strange was to be the spring 2021 show, with Huizinga’s composition as one part of a double bill with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas: “a commission by Opera Atelier that gathers together the baroque and the contemporary,” as Jenna Simeonov described the season as originally planned in her opera blog, Schmopera, back in January. As things stand now, OA’s being able to pivot Something Rich and Strange into this October slot has been crucial to salvaging two seasons. This past April’s Handel’s Resurrection, an early COVID-19 casualty, has been moved into the April 2021 slot to maintain the vital Easter connection. What has been lost is the resonance of Resurrection’s original pairing this past April with OA’s Don Giovanni last fall, in a 2019/20 season teasingly titled “Saints and Sinners.” Similarly, Something Rich and Strange, in its original April 2021 slot, was slated to follow The Magic Flute, also core Opera Atelier repertoire. It was to be two seasons balancing old and new: something timetested paired with something new; something definitely the opera 10 | October 2020 thewholenote.com

paired with something we wouldn’t have understood as operatic without one of the kinds of storytelling OA does best – finding moment-by-moment storylines in lyrical musical things, and unlocking them vocally, physically, dramatically and visually. Saints and sinners has an inbuilt operatic arc to it. Saints and more saints? Maybe not so much. But these are not ordinary times. Opera Atelier’s decision, as far back as last fall, to move this spring’s scheduled Resurrection into streaming-friendly Koerner Hall, with its re-expandable live-audience potential, looks prophetic now. In reality, they mostly have Hamilton to thank for taking over OA’s Ed Mirvish Theatre home base for an unspecified amount of time. Just how unspecified, none of us knew. Owen Sound “With all the changes to the timing and the piece itself, we [Measha and I] decided the best way to finish up is to get on a plane,” Huizinga explains. “I have been working on it for months and months – so many calls and Zooms, I’m exhausted. “Get on a plane, make my way there. Because I can and because I must. I’m the kind of artist who likes to dive head first right in, and I am still relatively new at writing for voice. And of course I am not done here yet!” He’s not complaining about the change to the deadline or scope of the piece. They are matters of fact. “I know the world is completely flipped upside down and thrown in the washing machine and someone added the wrong kind of soap,” he says. “But this is the time we have to tear open the door and play wherever we can, whether it’s on our driveway or in a beautiful concert hall, or at six degrees celsius in an Owen Sound garden as the sun sets, because music is something people need to lean towards when things are harsh.” The words tumble: “Like here, in Owen Sound. We have a really loyal audience coming out and helping us and it was so obvious last night – there was this moment following the beautiful long applause after the final piece, where everyone stood up out of their lawn chairs and realized how special it is to just hear music travelling through the air towards their ears. We need this, David. There are many of us who have literally spent our lives finding music. So we have to just go find it.” For Sweetwater this season, that vision has taken the form of a string quartet (Huizinga himself along with close colleagues Marc Destrubé, violin, Keith Hamm, viola and Judy Hereish, cello) “bubbling” for a week together in an old house in downtown Owen Sound – sounds of music from four centuries being tried out, drifting through wide-open windows to the ears of neighbours and passers by; then four days of crisscrossing Owen Sound and Meaford for pop-up concerts at pavilions, historic homes and museums, gazebos and gardens, a bandstand, and the Owen Sound Farmer’s Market. And in the the evenings between, the garden concerts with their glorious sunsets where, at the end of it all, a live audience – no streaming – stands up from their chairs to listen to quiet air, washed clean by music. Halifax This is the second time Huizinga and Brueggergosman have worked face to face on the project. The first time, in late February, after signing on to the project, she visited him in California where he’s spent the last year, right after taking the project on. “My cabin in the woods – that I’m renting – has luckily survived the fires. You could say I was evacuated,” he says, “but I had already put into place a master plan to get to Canada and quarantine and follow these two streams.” For their first face-to-face collaboration, they went to Big Sur. “Kind of amusing now,” Huizinga says. “Going somewhere ‘remote’ in order to work. Back then it was called a retreat, now it has a different name.” After COVID hit, he says, the project took a back seat for a couple of months, and then Opera Atelier came back to us with a lot of changes, and ideas and thoughts, and of course the new deadline. Again there’s that matter-of-factness to it all. “I kind of see the Opera Ateliers as the stars of this pandemic,” Brueggergosman says. “They at least rallied to provide sustenance to their artists. Always saying they know it’s not enough, but if we circle our wagons together in the same direction, we might just come through this on the right side of history, on the right side of what it means to be essential as an “I kind of see the Opera Ateliers as the stars of this pandemic. They at least rallied to provide sustenance to their artists. Always saying they know it’s not enough, but if we circle our wagons together in the same direction, we might just come through this on the right side of history, on the right side of what it means to be essential as an artist, understanding that the world in crisis needs beauty.” — Measha Brueggergosman artist, understanding that the world in crisis needs beauty. Dedication to that, to excellence, can be its own pandemic.” She’s always been a fighter, Brueggergosman says, “but in order to be a fighter you need to have an enemy and, for me, artists have found that the classical music industry has never been, well, forward thinking. Right? We’re just not wired that way. It’s not what we do. We are holders and keepers of the grail. We are responsible for this repertoire we keep alive through our interpretation and our artistry.” As she sees it, the industry has always been inadequate in its multipronged approach. “It has abandoned service, which is its real point, for spectacle,” she says. “And that’s why we, as artists are fighting for our legitimacy, because we turned ourselves into circus animals and not community rallyers, which is what we are supposed to be for. And TORONTO BACH FESTIVAL Announcing a season of five online concerts and events beginning November 2020 TORONTOBACHFESTIVAL.ORG thewholenote.com October 2020 | 11