Looking for some thing suitable to do on National Indigenous Peoples Day (June 21st) that has a classical music twist?  Soprano Deantha Edmunds is performing in the Music Garden at Harbourfront at 7pm.  I spoke to Deantha at her home in Newfoundland yesterday to find out what we might expect.

So a bit of background on Deantha who you may have seen in Toronto in Shanawdithit and Two Odysseys or in Against the Grain’s Messiah Complex.  She’s from a musical family in Newfoundland.  Her father was an Inuk from Labrador; raised with a strong Moravian  musical tradition and educated at a residential school in North West River and was, besides being a successful civil engineer, one of those (annoying) people who could just pick up an instrument and play it.  Her mother is settler Newfoundlander and always musical.  She grew up with piano and singing lessons, school choir and so on and decided to become a music teacher very early on.  So she did.

More recently she’s also been writing her own songs in a classical art song vein with an Indigenous sensibility.  On the 21st she’ll be singing some of them; mostly from her Connections album, with recorded string quartet accompaniment  (Atlantic String Quartet).  On their CD release many of these songs included throat singing but that won’t be happening in Torpnto (alas!).  Besides her own songs, she’s also recorded an album, Pillorikput Inuit, of Moravian sacred music in Inuktitut with Inuk tenor Karrie Obed.

Current and upcoming projects include  a one person play, Stolen Sisters, which is touring across Newfoundland and Labrador, a new piece that will be premiered at this years’s Stratford Summer Music and a piece for Toronto’s Amadeus Choir called Braiding Voices that will “braid” throat singing, Hildegard von Bingen and contemporary music.  There’s also an opera in the works, co-composed with Jessica McMann.  It’s called Irngutaq (Grandchild) and will be sung in a mix of English and Inuktitut.  No info on dates though.

See you at the Music Garden!