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SHANNON MACLEOD MIRAMICHI LEADER
From the plantation field to the concert hall, singer Measha Brueggergosman said the songs featured in Sunday’s concert keep her in awe.
The New Brunswick Youth Orchestra will join forces with Brueggergosman, a classically trained soprano operatic singer, and composer-arranger Aaron Davis. Together they’re presenting a fundraising concert at the James M. Hill Memorial High School theatre on Sunday at 2 p.m. featuring selections from Songs of Freedom.
Songs of Freedom is a four-part TV series and feature documentary, produced for VisionTV (Canada). For it, Brueggergosman performed a spiritual collection of freedom songs that emerged from Africa via the slave trade to the United States, then to Canada through the underground railroad.
“I’m really in awe of this repertoire, the traditional, spiritual music has had a long journey from the field to the concert hall is now being heralded for its depths, its ability to change lives and sustain people through incredible hardship,”Brueggergosman said in an phone interview from her home in Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. “It doesn’t really matter where you fall on the spectrum of faith or beliefs, it really comes down to it being a song of the people who celebrated in the face of adversity.”
Brueggergosman, who’s originally from Fredericton, said Barbara Willis Sweete approached her for Songs of Freedom, and she was honoured to be a part of it, and exploring her family’s genealogy.
“The Book of Negroes is essentially my family’s story from the Black Loyalists, to my family’s name actually being in The Book of Negroes,” she said.“Having the soundtrack reflect that trajectory and narrative, I have been intrinsically linked, genealogically and as a musician, arranger and performer.”
The Book of Negroes is a historical document the names and descriptions of 3,000 Black Loyalists, were recorded. The Black Loyalists, where the African-American slaves who escaped to the British colonies during the American Revolution and were evacuated by the British by ship as non-slaves to Nova Scotia.
To take it even further with the NBYO and their orchestral arrangements of Songs of Freedom, Brueggergosman said it is shaping up to be a moving and powerful concert, for her and she expects the audience as well.
“An even larger incarnation of this celebration of such a rich subsection of my repertoire,”she said.
Songs of Freedom score songs such as “Amazing Grace,” “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,”“Go Tell it on the Mountain” and Sunday’s concert will feature eight songs, specially arranged by Davis.
Davis, who’s widely known as the co-founder of the jazz ensemble Manteca, also did the arrangements on Songs of Freedom, and will be in Miramichi playing keyboard with the orchestra, under the direction of Tony Delgado, for those songs.
“The desire is to give this collection of songs an extremely long life,”she said.
This will be the first time Brueggergosman will perform those songs with an orchestra which she said has been a long-held dream of hers.
“There’s nothing that quite like performing with an orchestra. It’s my job to be sure as a concert artist and an opera singer, usually accompanied by chamber concerts, recitals. But to have my work intersect with my history is a very special thing,”she said.
Brueggergosman said the first time she sang with an orchestra was with the Fredericton Chamber Players, today known as the Fredericton Symphony Orchestra.
“I was 17, singing Mozart’s“Exsultate, Jubilate”and exerts from Handel’s Messiah and I’ll never forget having that sound, in my case, behind me,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. Now, for the past eight, 10 years I’ve always faced the orchestra in rehearsals because I’m so incredibly humbled by that collection of people all simultaneously deciding what we’re going to do.”
It’s one thing to hear orchestral music on a record, but when it’s live and in the NBYO’s case, with 75 members between the ages of 11 and 22, it’s profoundly moving, which is why she’s taken to facing the orchestra during performances.
“I’m just not prepared for it, I’m still not prepared for it, even though I know it’s going to happen, and most of the time I know who’s playing what,” she said. “I’m still incredibly humbled by that process.”
As a classical musician, Brueggergosman said everyday she continues to learn, every day.
“But once in a while, you’re handed something that is immediately satisfying, that you know even the process of these arrangements means that this music will be taken to another level,” she said. “When I’m gone, someone else will sing these and I’ve grateful to be part of adding to the lexicon in that way.”
Brueggergosman recently returned from rehearsing in Miami, Fla., while the weather was nice, it’s a different world down there with congestion, tons of people and a different lifestyle.
“We all live in a state of grace, especially as Canadians having won the lottery, being born here. We live in a constant state of grace, whether we acknowledge it or we take it for granted, it simply an incredible country and is growing more and more incredible every day.”
She said she knows how lucky she is to live where she does.
“When I wake up in the morning, I don’t have to spend my days looking for clean drinking water or dodging bullet fire, so I have to enjoy it, it’s my responsibility to enjoy it,” she said, as she was looking out her window over a lake.
In a previous interview with the Miramichi Leader, Ken MacLeod, president and chief executive officer of the NBYO and Sistema NB, said this concert is a fundraiser to support the work of the NBYO and Sistema NB.
“Once a year, we do a special guest-artist fundraising concert and we do that in some location in the province,” he said.“We chose Miramichi because we just started Sistema there and we really want to support the Sistema program and we want to build a relationship with the community.”
Sistema NB is a program to offer elementary-school aged children training in classical music, free of charge. Students have access upwards of 15 hours of training on a weekly basis. Students in Miramichi from St. Andrew’s Elementary School, Ian Baillie Primary School and the Napan Elementary School have been active in the program since January and in February, all received their violins and violas.
The Miramichi Sistema program based out of St. Andrews Elementary School under the direction of Sistema instructors Carlos Armao, a native of Venezuela, and Emily Field, both of whom are graduates of the prestigious McGill University music program.
Students from Ian Baillie and Napan Elementary School are also be eligible for the Sistema sessions. The program will eventually migrate to the incoming elementary school set to be built on King Street by the time that facility welcomes students in the fall of 2017.
Tickets for the March 20 concert are available through the Big Brothers, Big Sisters/Boys & Girls Club, located at 115 Maher St., or at Brookdale Flower Shop 488 King George Hwy. The cost is $28.50 for adults and $20 for students.
