How Measha Brueggergosman-Lee's decade-long plan to work with Margaret Atwood paid off
The soprano is the winner of a 2024 Governor General's Performing Arts Award
Measha Brueggergosman-Lee has performed at the opening ceremony for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, won a Juno Award and was nominated for a Grammy.
But the soprano says that none of these achievements compare to having Margaret Atwood make an album with her.
Brueggergosman-Lee's Zombie Blizzard sets to music seven of Atwood's poems, all of which come from the author's collection, Dearly. Each track on the album first has Atwood recite the poem, then has another track of Brueggergosman-Lee singing a concert aria of it set to jazz-inspired music composed by Aaron Davis.
"I just made this project so that we could be at the same place at the same time," Brueggergosman-Lee tells Tom Power in a Q interview.
Now, Brueggergosman-Lee shares something else with Atwood: a Governor General's Award. Atwood has won several Governor General's Literary Awards for her work. Brueggergosman-Lee is this year's recipient of the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement for her classical music work. On Saturday, Brueggergosman-Lee will be celebrated, along with six other award recipients, at the 2024 GGPAA Gala.
For Brueggergosman-Lee, the accolades don't matter as much as achieving her goal of finally meeting Atwood.
"When I read Edible Woman in 12th grade, I was like, 'Someday this woman is going to give me a key to her house, and we're going to be best friends forever,'" Brueggergosman-Lee says.
The soprano would go to the ceremony for the Giller Prize, the prestigious literary award for Canadian authors, just to try and meet Atwood. She even ended up joining the board of the Giller Prize. When Brueggergosman-Lee asked the author if she could make an album of her poems set to a "cycle of concert arias," Atwood gave her the green light.
"It's not because I'm great," Brueggergosman-Lee says. "It's because Margaret Atwood is incredibly generous. She's a … community person."
The classical music star chose to use Dearly for her album because of its themes of loss. Atwood wrote the collection of poems as she watched her husband, Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson, fade away from dementia. He died in 2019.
Brueggergosman-Lee connected with the work because she lost her father the same year that Gibson died. On the same day as her father's death, she also suffered a heart attack and underwent open heart surgery.
"I love how Margaret holds so loosely to these profoundly foundational truths," she says. "We can miss who is here, we can miss who has gone, and we can even miss what we're hoping for."
In one of the poems, "Blizzard," Atwood talks about her ageing mother. She ends it with these words: "It's time for her to go deeper, / into the blizzard ahead of her, / both dark and light, like snow. / Why can't I let go of her? / Why can't I let her go?"
The musical track of "Blizzard," has Brueggergosman-Lee sing the poem to a song that slowly builds up to this haunting finale.
"We get lulled into believing that songs are supposed to sound like songs, when sometimes they can sound like stories," she says.
Brueggergosman-Lee got some more one-on-one time with Atwood, when she performed all seven songs for her in a private concert.
"I'm doing [the album] as an offering to her, really to say thanks so much for the awesome words," she says. "I have loved her with the heat of a thousand suns."
This project meant so much to Brueggergosman-Lee that she executive produced it.
"I don't executive produce lightly," Brueggergosman-Lee says. "When I go to make something, I expect that my children will be listening to it when I'm dead. So I'm thinking: let's make this matter."
