Afro-Canadian soprano
Measha Brueggergosman (the unusual name is a mixture of her maiden name and her husband's last name) continues with this, her third album, to show herself as a distinctive talent rather than a novelty. The trio of composers included on Surprise may seem unusual (and
Brueggergosman's early champion
William Bolcom must be delighted to find himself alongside the likes of Schoenberg and Satie), but actually the program is logical, consistently hanging on the edge of popular song while maintaining various degrees of contemporary distance from it. Schoenberg's Brettl-Lieder are edgy but funny cabaret songs of which a musicologist wrote that one can be grateful for their presence in an oeuvre that contains few smiles. Here and in
Bolcom's Cabaret Songs to poems by Arnold Weinstein,
Brueggergosman benefits from her ability to inject a note of broad humor without camping the music up. Her lusty reading of
Bolcom's little vignettes of everyday life is far superior to the arch treatments they are sometimes given. She may even find something in his songs that
Bolcom himself did not put there, which is of course the mark of a great interpreter (and again, she may be aided by
Bolcom's presence as accompanist).
Brueggergosman adjusts her style nicely for Satie's more quizzical humor, stylistically an epoch away from the spectacular French arias she chose for her second album. It's hard to think of a listener, even among those not oriented toward vocal music, who would not enjoy this release, and the ability to go from Berlioz to Fauré to Satie announces that
Measha Brueggergosman has arrived, with attitude intact. Camera-friendly, a champion communicator in the concert hall, and already an unusually versatile performer,
Brueggergosman seems limited at this point only by the imagination she and her handlers can muster in developing her career.