Volume 26 Issue 2 - October 2020
Following the Goldberg trail from Gould to Lang Lang; Measha Brueggergosman and Edwin Huizinga on face to face collaboration in strange times; diggings into dance as FFDN keeps live alive; "Classical unicorn?" - Luke Welch reflects on life as a Black classical pianist; Debashis Sinha's adventures in sound art; choral lessons from Skagit Valley; and the 21st annual WholeNote Blue Pages (part 1 of 3) in print and online. Here now. And, yes, still in print, with distribution starting Thursday October 1.
Following the Goldberg trail from Gould to Lang Lang; Measha Brueggergosman and Edwin Huizinga on face to face collaboration in strange times; diggings into dance as FFDN keeps live alive; "Classical unicorn?" - Luke Welch reflects on life as a Black classical pianist; Debashis Sinha's adventures in sound art; choral lessons from Skagit Valley; and the 21st annual WholeNote Blue Pages (part 1 of 3) in print and online. Here now. And, yes, still in print, with distribution starting Thursday October 1.
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FEATURE<br />
ANATOMY OF A COLLABORATION<br />
Edwin Huizinga and<br />
Measha Brueggergosman DAV<br />
ID PER L M A N<br />
Huizinga with Marc Destrubé, violin, Keith Hamm, viola and Judy Hereish, cello in Owen Sound<br />
JOHN WHITE<br />
Two leisurely phone calls – well an old-fashioned<br />
phone call and a Zoom chat, to be precise – bracket<br />
this story. The phone call, bright and early on the<br />
morning of Saturday, September 19, was with violinist/<br />
composer Edwin Huizinga, calling from Owen Sound,<br />
where the 16th annual Sweetwater Festival (Huizinga’s<br />
first as artistic director) was well under way. The Zoom<br />
chat, just three days later, was also bright and early –<br />
with Huizinga again, this time alongside singer Measha<br />
Brueggergosman – at a table inside Brueggergosman’s<br />
Halifax home, a kitchen behind them, and posttropical<br />
storm Teddy, his career as a hurricane having<br />
been cancelled ahead of his Maritime tour, whipping<br />
aimlessly at the trees outside.<br />
I’d been wanting to talk to Huizinga and Brueggergosman for a<br />
while about their current collaboration, but had been expecting to<br />
have to speak with each of them separately, so it was an unexpected<br />
bonus to find out, part way through the Saturday call with Huizinga,<br />
that he would be flying to Nova Scotia on the Monday “to finish<br />
a project with our amazing fearless Canadian soprano, Measha<br />
Brueggergosman.”<br />
“Finish the project” sounds optimistic to me. For one thing,<br />
Huizinga and Opera Atelier (OA) have been exploring the 24-line<br />
poem at the heart of the project (Annunciation to Mary by<br />
Bohemian/Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke) for well over two years.<br />
For another thing, the piece as described for the upcoming<br />
<strong>October</strong> 28 Koerner Hall “livestreamed and fully staged” production,<br />
Something Rich and Strange, is less far along than the vision<br />
for it expressed in OA’s pre-pandemic <strong>2020</strong>/21 season announcement,<br />
where Something Rich and Strange was to be the spring<br />
2021 show, with Huizinga’s composition as one part of a double bill<br />
with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas: “a commission by Opera Atelier<br />
that gathers together the baroque and the contemporary,” as Jenna<br />
Simeonov described the season as originally planned in her opera<br />
blog, Schmopera, back in January.<br />
As things stand now, OA’s being able to pivot Something Rich and<br />
Strange into this <strong>October</strong> slot has been crucial to salvaging two seasons.<br />
This past April’s Handel’s Resurrection, an early COVID-19 casualty, has<br />
been moved into the April 2021 slot to maintain the vital Easter connection.<br />
What has been lost is the resonance of Resurrection’s original<br />
pairing this past April with OA’s Don Giovanni last fall, in a 2019/20<br />
season teasingly titled “Saints and Sinners.” Similarly, Something Rich<br />
and Strange, in its original April 2021 slot, was slated to follow The<br />
Magic Flute, also core Opera Atelier repertoire.<br />
It was to be two seasons balancing old and new: something timetested<br />
paired with something new; something definitely the opera<br />
10 | <strong>October</strong> <strong>2020</strong> thewholenote.com