Philadelphia Orchestra to premiere ‘Songs for Murdered Sisters’

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The Philadelphia Orchestra is giving the American premiere of the fully orchestrated song cycle “Songs for Murdered Sisters,” born out of one of Canada’s most harrowing incidents of domestic violence.

On Sept. 22, 2015, Basil Borutski embarked on a shocking murder spree in Renfrew County, Ontario, killing three former girlfriends. The tragedy, considered the worst case of domestic violence in Canada, ended with Borutski serving a life sentence.

The murdered were Anastasia Kuzyk, Carol Culleton and Nathalie Warmerdam, who is the sister of baritone Joshua Hopkins. Moved by grief, Hopkins and his wife, mezzo singer Zoe Tarshis, set out to create a set of art songs to address these killings and intimate partner violence globally.

“My primary goal was to, as a man, become an ally to the organizations that exist across the world for addressing the issue of domestic violence, intimate partner violence and femicide,” Hopkins said.

“Songs for Murdered Sisters,” by writer Margaret Atwood and composer Jake Heggie, premiered in 2022 as an eight-song cycle for voice and piano. It was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera and the National Art Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, Ontario, where the full orchestra version premiered in 2023.

Conductor Yannick Zezet Seguin will lead the Philadelphia Orchestra in the American premiere of the fully orchestrated version on a program with Mahler’s 9th Symphony, with two performances at Marion Anderson Hall in Philadelphia and a third at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

“To see the culmination of all this hard work come together to present this beautiful and powerful song cycle with the Philadelphia Orchestra and with Yannick Nezet Seguin, is just beyond anything I could have dreamed when we first started talking about the project,” Hopkins said.

The song cycle begins with Hopkins addressing an empty chair in song, representing the absence left by his sister’s murder. The songs move through stages of grief, including anger, sadness and disorientation.

By the conclusion, the piece expands beyond Warmerdam’s personal tragedy to more generally address the epidemic of domestic violence.

In Canada each year, more than 100 women and girls are killed in gender-based violence, according to government statistics. That number is exponentially greater in the U.S., where about 1,690 intimate partner homicides were committed in 2021, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Globally, the United Nations reports 47,000 women were killed by intimate partners in 2020.

“I don’t believe in the canon of classical repertoire; there is much repertoire that addresses, head-on, the epidemic that gender-based violence is around the world,” Hopkins said.

The classic canon can, in fact, seem quite the opposite, where opera in particular has employed violence against women as a storytelling trope for hundreds of years.

Hopkins grew up in Canada with his older sister and is now based in Houston, where he performed in Heggie’s opera “It’s a Wonderful Life” several years ago. Heggie is known for works that confront themes of mortal violence, such as “Dead Man Walking,” which is about capital punishment, and two pieces based on the Holocaust.

During a break in rehearsals, Hopkins invited the composer to lunch and proposed his idea for songs about the scourge of domestic violence.

“I told him yes, I’m 100% on board. But we have got to find an amazing Canadian author to do the text,” Heggie recalled. “It needs to be someone with a really powerful voice for women, and immediately we both thought of Margaret Atwood. I mean, who’s more powerful?”

The celebrated poet and novelist is most recognized for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but Atwood had not written songs before. When Hopkins and Heggie approached her with the idea she did not immediately agree, but shared that she personally knew women who had been killed by their partners.

After a few questions from Atwood about the project, communication went silent. Then one day, without forewarning, Hopkins and Heggie got an email from Atwood with eight fully realized song lyrics.

Heggie said they were “flawless.” He didn’t change a syllable.

“Sometimes when people write lyrics or poetry to be set as art songs, and they’re new at it, they’ll send these massively long diatribes. And it doesn’t work,” he said. “But she intuitively left a lot of space for music to do the storytelling. That was a great gift.”

The songs are full of longing and rage, as a disoriented singer wanders through an emotional landscape in a search for solace and redemption. At one point, he sings to the birds as though they were the embodiment of the soul of his sister:

Are you an owl,
Soft-feathered predator?
Are you hunting, restlessly hunting
The soul of your murderer?

Heggie said the structure is loosely modeled on an 1827 song cycle by Franz Schubert.

“If you consider Schubert’s ‘Winterreise,’ which is this man who has experienced an incredible loss and is out in nature, looking for how to make sense of it,” he said. “It’s a very similar journey, trying to find where your loved one is, what happens to them. Could I have done anything?”

“Songs for Murdered Sisters” has been presented as a chamber piece, a film, released as an album, and now an orchestra piece. So far it has always been sung by Hopkins.

Heggie has not yet heard his own orchestration of “Songs.” He was not able to attend the Canadian premiere almost two years ago. He plans to be at Carnegie Hall to finally hear the realization of his work.

He said when Hopkins is backed by a full orchestra, he will sound lonelier than ever.

“There is so much around him, so many bodies, so much sound around him. And yet, he’s on this very personal journey,” Heggie said. “He’s only got his voice. There’s something very isolating about that, which I find very, very moving.”

“Songs for Murdered Sisters” will be performed with Mahler’s nine symphony, in Philadelphia at Marion Anderson Hall on Jan. 9 and 11. The Philadelphia Orchestra will take the program to Carnegie Hall in New York City on Jan. 15.