One of Canada’s most renowned sopranos will make her National Ballet of Canada debut alongside one of the world’s leading contemporary choreographers. Starting on February 27, Measha Brueggergosman-Lee will perform with the ballet in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern. This pairing, Brueggergosman-Lee warns, “is going to rip your heart out in the best way. It’s going to kick you right in the spirit.”

Shockingly, this will be Brueggergosman-Lee’s first time on stage at The Four Seasons Centre, despite a successful decades-long career performing as an opera singer, releasing award-winning albums, and working with orchestras around the world. For Brueggergosman-Lee, the seed for this momentous performance was planted decades ago, in a cabaret bar in Hell’s Kitchen. This is where she first met David Briskin, who went on to become Principal Conductor of the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra. 

“I was singing at Don’t Tell Mama, and I was not singing opera,” she says. “I sat back down in my seat after belting something out. And he was like…you do something else, don’t you?”

Brueggergosman-Lee told him she was in town for a recital at Carnegie Hall, which Briskin then attended. From there, a creative spark was formed. Many years later, Pite’s Flight Pattern became their chance to share that with the world.

Pite has described Flight Pattern as her personal response to the global refugee crisis, her “way of coping with the world at the moment.” As in Pite’s previous work, Flight Pattern features dancers breaking away from the group to convey individual stories as part of a larger narrative of displacement and loss.

“She sees the plague of our immigrant brothers and sisters. She sees the rampant racism that is taken as just another day…she sees how we’re not responding the way human beings who care about other human beings should respond,” Brueggergosman-Lee says. 

The Olivier Award-winning piece all began with Pite’s choice of score—Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). Brueggergosman-Lee will be performing the symphony’s first movement, a depiction of a mother’s despair at losing her son. 

“It’s the definition of unhurried. It will not rush itself. Very much like grief, very much an echo of maternal pain, which is a very unique kind of pain,” she says. For Brueggergosman-Lee, this profound grief strikes a deeply personal chord.  

“I have also lost two babies on the way to the two babies that God did give me to raise,” she says. “The brilliance of this piece is that it doesn’t censor sorrow. It doesn’t truncate grief. It takes its time and it allows what we really need in our society, a collective crying out, a collective mournful repentance at where we are.”

Brueggergosman-Lee is no stranger to uniting creative disciplines in a way that might be considered unconventional. Her latest album, Zombie Blizzard, brings together her classically-trained vocals, Margaret Atwood’s poetry, music from jazz composer Aaron Davis, and accompaniment from Hannaford Street Silver Band— a combination that Brueggergosman-Lee was certain would work. 

“I’m very jazzed to bring together what people say shouldn’t come together,” she says. “The more disparate the components, the more excited it makes me.” Since the album’s release in 2024, she has performed Zombie Blizzard live across the US and Canada, with more shows lined up for 2026. 

Brueggergosman-Lee is just as surprised as we are that this will be her debut at The Four Seasons Centre, a venue she has often frequented as an audience member, but will only now be returning to as a performer, partially thanks to that chance meeting in a cabaret bar many years ago. She tells us that landing an opportunity in this way seems on par with her career trajectory thus far.

“I have come in the side door, front door, back door, the trap door. I want that to serve as an encouragement to somebody who thinks that they can only get to where they want to go using a path that has already been used,” she says. “In fact, encourage the person coming behind you by doing it and getting there in a new way.”

See Measha Brueggergosman-Lee perform with The National Ballet of Canada in ‘Flight Pattern / Suite En Blanc’, onstage February 27-March 6.