Measha Brueggergosman has called singing “her sweet abandon” from a very young age. Born in 1977, Measha Gosman grew up listening to the radio, especially classical music, the predominant programming in her hometown of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Early on, her first grade teacher recognized her remarkable sense of pitch and her fearlessness as a performer. She recommended that the Gosmans give Measha music lessons, which they did, signing her up for both piano and voice. For many years, Measha assumed she would become a classical pianist. But at 15, when she was scheduled to play the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto with Symphony New Brunswick, she developed a bad case of nerves.
After some soul searching, she realized that voice performance held no terror for her; piano quickly became the career not taken. She subsequently studied voice at the University of Toronto with soprano Mary Morrison and continued her musical education after graduation with soprano and Lieder expert Edith Wiens in Germany. Although she does not think that a singer over 25-years-old should be called a “rising star,” the youthful Canadian’s career continues to ascend.
After winning a slew of prizes: 2002 Jeunesses Musicals Montreal International; the Wigmore Hall International Song Competition; the George London Prize; the Queen Sonja International Music Competition, Oslo; the ARD Music Competition, Munich and ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Holland, Ms. Brueggergosman is in great demand as both an opera singer and concert artist. Recent significant symphonic debuts have included acclaimed performances with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Hans Graf and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and with the Deutsches-Symphonie Orchester Berlin singing Strauss’s Vier Letzte Lieder.
Past recital debuts include performances at Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, the Kennedy Center, Spivey Hall, Atlanta, and at the Edinburgh, Bergen, Verbier, and Tuscan Sun festivals. She recently reprised a role that was formative to her as a college student – Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s The Dialogues of the Carmelites for the Vancouver Opera. She has also sung Juno in Aeneas in Karthago at the Staatsoper Stuttgart, and both Liù in Turandot and Sister Rose in Dead Man Walking, for the Cincinnati Opera. She gave a series of concerts at the Stratford Summer Music Festival spanning opera, Broadway, jazz, spirituals and Motown. An exhaustive list of her opera, concert and recital performances would be just that, exhausting. Ms. Brueggergosman has two commercial recordings to date, both for CBC Records: So Much to Tell, works by Copland, Barber and Gershwin, which received a Juno nomination last year, and Extase, also for CBC Records, featuring works by Massenet and Berlioz, including Les nuits d’été, with Yoav Talmi conducting L’Orchestre symphonique de Québec.
The woman who describes her role as that of “muse and servant”, has sung for celebrities and statesmen like the Queen of England and Nelson Mandela. But she considers her true calling changing the lives of her audience, no matter who they are. She has been married since 1999 to Markus Brueggergosman, whom she met when he was a foreign exchange student, with whom she has compounded her life and her name. They live in Toronto.
