Music Toronto, at the Jane Mallett Theatre
Just what makes Measha Bruggergosman so good? The Fredericton-born soprano is just 22 and graduated from the University of Toronto's music program a year ago. Yet she's already provided one of the most memorable operatic performances in this city in several years, in the title role of James Rolfe's Beatrice Chancy, premiered by the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre; a television version will be aired by the CBC in March. On New Year's Eve, she took her place, swathed in gold, among the all-stars at Roy Thomson Hall's Millennium Opera Gala, and brought down the house, singing the hell out of the diva aria from La Wally. On Thursday night, under the auspices of Music Toronto, she gave a solo recital which grew almost surreptitiously into a spellbinder.
Part of Bruggergosman's sorcery -- but only a part of it -- is the voice itself, a large, wide-ranging soprano, lustrous and full-blooded. Not unexpectedly, the instrument is in a continuous state of development, and its extremes aren't yet equalized; for part of Thursday's recital, too, the singer seemed to be struggling against the remnants of a cold. But whatever small flaws exist are more than redeemed by what I would call this artist's expressive imperative. Every phrase seems invested with emotion, which Bruggergosman conveys through her phrasing, the way she weights her texts, and the rich and spontaneous range of feeling she has at her disposal. When it all comes together, the effect can be breathtaking.
She felt her way into the recital slowly, gingerly, starting more as a gifted student than a powerhouse. Two Purcell songs were distinguished, as was everything she sang, by her effortlessly clear diction, but she didn't make them hers. Six songs from Schumann's Liederkreis showed skill in sustaining mood through controlled dynamics and legato, but the tonal colouring was in pastels, not in the rich, saturated hues she was about to display.
It was in the four songs from Berlioz's cycle Les nuits d'été that she hit her stride, filling the long-breathing vocal lines with a seductive splendour. When in Le spectre de la rose she sang the line about arriving from paradise, the cosmology seemed wholly credible; the renunciation of love in Sur les lagunes was shattering. Robert Kortgaard, ever the generous piano accompanist, provided subtle, sensitive support.
In the recital's second half, Bruggergosman -- now on fire vocally -- delivered Turina's Tres sonetos with gorgeous insinuation, and in the second song's throwaway retort " Guarda, Pablo" (Watch out, Pablo), she managed to be funny, dangerous and wildly sexy all in the same instant. She concluded the formal recital with four selections from Honey and Rue, which André Previn wrote, to texts by Toni Morrison, for Kathleen Battle in 1992. Bruggergosman's magnificent, scorching performance surpassed anything that Battle had ever done with the cycle, and in the final song Take my mother home -- for which the context is slavery, thus matching themes from Beatrice Chancy -- the singer took us on an emotional journey never to be forgotten.
Among her encores was Gershwin's Our Love is Here to Stay, which, given the way that Measha Bruggergosman had bonded with an adoring audience, seemed just a simple statement of fact.