Joshua Hopkins and the NACO shine in Heggie and Atwood’s new Songs for Murdered Sisters

The principal work on the National Arts Centre Orchestra's Toronto programme was Jake Heggie’s song cycle setting Margaret Atwood’s poems, Songs for Murdered Sisters. Joining the orchestra was baritone Joshua Hopkins, reprising the premiere given two nights earlier in Ottawa.

There’s a story behind this piece, of course, and it’s not a pretty one. In September 2015 three women were murdered by a man they all knew. The killings took place in Renfrew County, an hour or so outside Ottawa, and one of the victims was Joshua Hopkins’ sister. In reaction, he set in train a series of events that would lead to the NACO and Houston Grand Opera commissioning an orchestral song cycle from Heggie and Atwood. It’s been played (and recorded) in piano score but Thursday, in the nation’s capital, and Saturday in Toronto, we got the first performances of the fully orchestrated version.

The eight poems effectively encapsulate the range of emotions generated by such a horrible event: loss, anger, hope, sadness, confusion and more. Each gets a fitting setting from Heggie. The first Empty Chair (“Who was my sister... is now an empty chair”) is a beautifully ethereal piece with flutes and tuned percussion floating over the strings. The despairing Dream gets a relentlessly bleak setting. It ends “And it is winter” and, God knows, winter in the Ottawa valley is bleak. Bird Soul riffs off the idea of transmigration, playing with the idea of the departed continuing to exist as a bird, whether a songbird or an owl seeking nocturnal revenge. It’s onomatopeic and evocative. In Rage the accompaniment starts off very lightly scored but soon becomes loud and dissonant (“To kill the man who killed you... Would be only fair”) and then starts to ask awkward questions closing with the words “Would you instead forgive?”. So much verbal and musical complexity is packed into these 25 minutes.

The performance was very, very fine. Hopkins’ voice has matured since he was singing Figaro in Barber. It’s darker and weightier though he can lighten up when needed. Here he effectively conveys the range of emotion required with musicality and without unnecessary vocal histrionics. Alexander Shelley coaxed a well matched performance from the NACO with the woodwinds and low strings sounding particularly good coupled with energetic work from the percussion. It was a most moving, fitting tribute to the memory of Nathalie Warmerdam and countless other women victims of domestic violence.

It was an interesting decision to bookend the Heggie with two pieces from the high Romantic period but I think it worked and probably drew a larger audience than if less conventional fare had been offered. The piece that started proceedings was Emilie Mayer’s Faust-Overture (1880). It’s programmatic and somehow manages to compress the essence of Goethe’s great poem into twelve minutes. She makes interesting use of the winds and switches moods through a slow intro depicting the brooding Faust, via a more dramatic section dealing with the Faust–Mephistopheles shenanigans to a switch from minor to major to close with an ecstatic depiction of Gretchen’s redemption. Shelley and the orchestra articulated the themes with great clarity.

After the interval we got Brahms’ Fourth Symphony. I think this is music that Shelley is very much into. His conducting of the sprightly, dance inflected, first movement was highly kinetic as well as musically incisive. He also brought clarity to the slower second movement with its echoes of Beethoven and energy to the third. He excelled in balancing clarity and energy in the complex, almost academic finale with its echoes of the Baroque, which all led to an exuberant coda which (just) managed to avoid bombast while being full of drama.

Besides conducting extremely well, Shelley gave one of the best introductory speeches I’ve heard at Roy Thomson. He explained and contextualized all three pieces in just enough detail without being longwinded or patronising. So, if the wonderful new Heggie/Atwood song cycle was the star of the evening, the perhaps unusual choice of support material was very well done and created a really enjoyable evening.