Anglais seulement
« As a soprano, Donna began her opera career with Peter Brook‘s production of La Tragédie de Carmen, a work which involved two months of intensive workshops with Peter Brook, learning his method of acting based on Stanislavsky, followed by three months of performing La Tragédie de Carmen in Paris, and then touring it throughout Europe for a year with his troupe. Since then she has performed all over the world and had special collaborations for over 15 years with Helmuth Rilling and John Eliot Gardiner, doing numerous recordings with both of them.
Margaret trained as a classical cellist as a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and was a professional cellist with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the National Arts Centre (NAC) Orchestra, she has since developed a career as a composer very much focusing on her own instrument. Her most recent solo album was Where Words Fail – Music For Healing from 2021, with music is born ‘in the hope that it can be helpful to others…it can offer some healing, some understanding, some comfort, some strength when we feel weak or when words fail us‘.
They see their new album as very much a creative outflow from two people, and the moods and emotions of the music they hope will elicit a reaction from listeners, and they comment that it is almost a mini-opera in the sense of journey, the music takes you there and back. They want the album to be a piece that makes people react.
The two met whilst Margaret was playing in the NAC Orchestra and heard Donna singing in projects with the orchestra. As Margaret started composing she felt that if she were to write for anyone’s voice it would be for Donna’s. Donna was a friend of friends and came to do a fundraiser for OrKidstra, the musical charity that Margaret had co-founded, so Margaret asked Donna about singing some of her music. Not that Margaret had written anything for voice at the time, and that first project took patience. Also, Margaret did not know what texts to use but when she mentioned this to Donna, it turned out that Donna wrote poetry or as she commented to me, ‘I write stuff‘. These texts spoke to Margaret and the collaboration was born…. »
