Canadian soprano bucks classical stereotypes

NEW YORK (Billboard) - "Sorry I'm late for our conversation," begins Measha Brueggergosman apologetically. "I'm coming straight from yoga class." As it turns out, the 30-year-old Canadian soprano's workout is part of a much bigger commitment.

She's just completed day 27 of a 30-day Bikram Yoga challenge, in which she takes a daily class at a studio heated to a balmy 105 degrees.

This is actually the third time she's taken on this particular challenge. The last time she did it, the singer says, she took two classes per day. "Just make something hard," Brueggergosman says with a laugh, "and then I'll do it."

That's a good way of summing up her career so far. And the bets she's taken are paying off handsomely, like choosing unusual repertoire (focusing almost exclusively on song rather than opera) and creating an image that's fully her own (down to her last name, which is a mouth-bending combination of her family and married names).

"I've never felt pressured to tread a narrower or more traditional path," she says. "I've never felt that I was singing repertoire that I didn't feel I had claimed." (Two previous albums, recorded for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s house label, featured songs by Copland, Barber and Gershwin; the follow-up was a disc of Berlioz and Massenet.)

The next step on her journey is her major-label debut, "Surprise" (October 9, Deutsche Grammophon). The recording includes Schoenberg's Cabaret Songs, five songs by Erik Satie and the world premiere of William Bolcom's Cabaret Songs. Joining the soprano on the recording are conductor David Robertson, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Bolcom himself (at the piano for three of the Satie selections).

The soprano is also featured on another new Deutsche Grammophon release, a recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 with the Cleveland Orchestra, led by Franz Welser-Most.

The playful, youthful style of packaging for "Surprise" (featuring a club-ready Brueggergosman on the cover) is decidedly hers.

"In pop music, great presentation sometimes camouflages inferior product," she says. "But we in classical music have the greatest product in the world. But as we all well know, there are so many truly crappy classical music album covers out there," she says with a laugh. "Why? People see you before they hear you, so why wouldn't you try not to start out with a deficit?"

The strength of "Surprise," though, isn't its gloss or knowing nod to a younger market. Underpinning the album is Brueggergosman's significant talent.

"As women, as singers, as people working in the classical music industry," she says, "we have a particular responsibility. The least we can do is breathe life into this music -- not change it or bastardize it, but sustain what we've inherited."

Her exuberance shines through, and all her choices buck the stereotype of singing divas, young and old.

"I'm just not that girl," Brueggergosman says. "It's not who I am, all that fluttering about and speaking breathily and with a weird accent and all that. It's not who I am or what I grew up with. It would just be exhausting, not to mention fundamentally wrong, to pretend that I'm somebody else."

Reuters/Billboard