Extase

We Say...

Review by Justin Davidson

Once you’ve paid just enough attention to Measha Brueggergosman to figure out how to pronounce her name, she becomes difficult to forget. In person, the Canadian soprano is armored, accessorized, made up and coiffed as if she spent every day shuttling between the catwalk and the operatic stage. In performance — most of which consists of concerts rather than opera — she combines grand-scale charisma with an aw-shucks-it’s-just-l’il-old-me demeanor. And on recording, she asserts herself instantly with a lush, chinchilla tone and a fiercely controlled energy.

Brueggergosman was only in her 20s when recorded Extase — before she acquired the physical confidence that came from dropping nearly 100 pounds, and before she had learned so much about lightness from singing cabaret songs. In Berlioz’ Nuits d’été, she misses some opportunities for subtlety and rides a little too heavily through the thicket of moist, beguiling melodies. The interpretation falls just shy of exquisite, as if it could use another draft, or just a little more experience. But she does grab hold of the essence of these songs: tragic romance, florid imagery twined around vine-like melodies in a bower of vernal orchestration, and a certain luxuriant morbidity. In “Le Spectre de la Rose,” the ghostly flower speaks to its faithless wearer, who adorns herself with another living being, only to cast it aside when it wilts: “You took me, still pearly / With the watering can’s silver tears / And, amid the spangled ball, / Escorted me all night.”

Brueggergosman follows that thread of melodrama with sincerity, reaching the high notes of extravagant reproach with plenty of power to spare. She is at her best in those sun-piercing-the-clouds cadences that make French lyric music so alluring, but even in an all-out fortissimo, she gives the impression that she could always get higher, louder and more ferocious if she chose.

Brueggergosman ties up this all-French album with a down-home fillip: Walter Hawkins’ “Goin’ up Yonder” gets the full-bore a cappella treatment.