Volume 25 Issue 3 - November 2019

FEATURE
CONFLUENCES
An Exploratory
Evening with
Mezzo-Soprano
Marion
Newman
DAVID PERLMAN
Marion Newman as Dr. Wilson in Missing
DEAN KALYAN
This past September 20, soprano Melody Courage
posted the following on Facebook:
What an incredible evening last night! It was such an
honour to perform the world premiere of Ian Cusson’s
beautiful aria ‘Dodo, mon tout petit’ with Alexander
Shelley. Ian was commissioned by the Canadian Opera
Company and National Arts Centre Orchestra to replace
the opening aria in Act 3 of the opera Louis Riel. It will
forever be inserted in the opera, taking the place of
the original aria which used a sacred Nisga’a melody
without permission. It was a monumental evening
in this time of reconciliation, and I am so honoured I
was asked to sing! … I was proud to share this moment
with, not only the incredibly gifted Métis composer Ian
Cusson, but my colleague Marion Newman who gave
a beautiful performance of Barbara Croall’s Zasakwaa:
There is a Heavy Frost. Marion, your passion and voice
within the indigenous community continues to inspire
me! I can’t wait to see where the future takes us!
The “incredible evening” she was referencing was a concert, on
September 19, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, of the NAC
Orchestra, and it serves as a useful narrative starting point for this
story, which will, eventually, journey towards another significant
evening, November 26, and repeated November 27, at Heliconian Hall,
titled An Evening with Marion Newman. It will explore, in words and
music, the question “What is classical Indigenous Music?” with the
musical participation of Newman herself, mezzo-soprano Rebecca
Cuddy, baritone Evan Korbut, and pianist Gordon Gerrard, with music
by composers Ian Cusson, Barbara Croall and others.
Some of these participants were involved in the September 19
Ottawa concert, some not. All will be people whose artistic lives have
intersected significantly with Newman’s. Some, but not all, are of
Indigenous background. All have significant classical credentials. And
all are committed participants in an emerging nationwide conversation
about the ways classical music can and must move away from a
model in which Indigenous song and storytelling have been up for
grabs by non-Indigenous composers, artists and academics, at the
same time as the Indigenous custodians of the words and works in
question were forbidden to utter them.
En route from Ottawa in September to Yorkville in November, we must
first detour to the West Coast, which is where I caught up, by phone, with
Marion Newman in Victoria, BC, in late October, where she found half
an hour to chat, very early in the morning of her first day off, halfway
through a two-opera engagement with Pacific Opera Victoria (POV).
The first of the two productions, Puccini’s Il trittico, was already
up and running. It’s better known by the names of its one-acter
constituent parts: Il tabarro (The Cloak), Suor Angelica (Sister
Angelica), and Gianni Schicchi. They are seldom performed together
this way, but when they are, they pack a cumulative punch, gaining
perspective by congruity. Newman’s role in Il triticco is in Suor
Angelica, where she plays two rather forbidding roles: The Mistress
of the Novices and the Abbess, in this tragic tale of a noblewoman
banished to a convent for bearing a son out of wedlock.
8 | November 2019 thewholenote.com