Imagine a concert experience with the voice and work of a one-in-a-generation cultural figure who is quite simply one of the world’s most powerful living writers. Add to that one of Canada’s top-tier sopranos and one of the nation’s foremost musical minds. That’s what you’ll get in Zombie Blizzard, an intimate, intense and powerful collaboration between soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee, author Margaret Atwood, and composer Aaron Davis. Presented by Pacific Opera Victoria on Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026, at the McPherson Playhouse, Zombie Blizzard draws from Atwood’s 2020 poetry collection Dearly. The song cycle features recorded recitations of seven of Atwood’s poems, delivered in her unmistakable, unsentimental voice, followed by Davis’s musical settings — performed live by Brueggergosman-Lee and a jazz trio — that transform the text into a genre-bending musical journey. For Brueggergosman-Lee, hearing Atwood’s voice first is essential to the audience’s experience. “I felt very strongly about having the listener hear the poems so that they can relax when they hear the song,” Brueggergosman-Lee said in an interview with Monday Magazine. “You’re not going to get a more authentic rendering of a poem than to have the poet themselves read it.” The poems — many written as Atwood was confronting her husband’s illness and mortality — move through grief, aging, gender, memory and survival. Brueggergosman-Lee traces the project’s structure to the tradition of the romantic song cycle, where poetry pre-exists the music and shapes its emotional arc. “These are poems that are taken from the perspective of a woman in various stages of her life,” she said. “That immediately brought to mind the Schumann song cycle — Songs on the Love and Life of a Woman.” Brueggergosman-Lee is an internationally acclaimed soprano, performing with leading orchestras and companies across North America and Europe. She is the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Classical Music. She is also artist-in-residence with Opera Atelier, serves as an advisor to Opera Canada, and sits on the board of the Giller Prize. She is also completing a master’s degree in practical theology, a field she has said is increasingly informing her creative and collaborative work. The Victoria performance features a slimmed-down ensemble from the work’s original brass-band premiere, placing Davis firmly in the driver’s seat at the piano. The more intimate jazz-trio setting heightens the sense of musical conversation, with Davis shaping the narrative in real time alongside Brueggergosman-Lee’s voice. The song cycle’s title, Zombie Blizzard, comes from the first two poems in Atwood’s Dearly collection, an unflinching examination of love, aging, mortality, gendered violence, and social control. Brueggergosman-Lee says she hopes audiences leave with a deeper, more honest connection to their own emotional lives. “I feel very much like myself when I sing this repertoire, when I sing this cycle,” she said. “I think it’s important that people understand the possibility of what classical music has the potential to be.” Brueggergosman-Lee, who has two grown children living in Victoria, also spoke warmly about Pacific Opera Victoria, praising the company’s ethos and its willingness to create space for intimate, artist-driven work. “I like Victoria. I like coming there. I have kids who live there. I have a reason to create art there.”
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