Globe and Mail

Hopkins and Songs for Murdered Sisters, created by Margaret Atwood and Jake Heggie, head to Carnegie Hall
January 2024

At Philadelphia’s Marian Anderson Hall on Jan. 9 and 11, and at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Jan. 15, Canadian baritone Joshua Hopkins and the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Montreal’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will perform Songs for Murdered Sisters, a song cycle inspired by Hopkins’s mission to combat violence against women.

It is the American orchestral premiere for the piece that made its symphonic debut last year in Ottawa, performed by the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Hopkins.

His sister, Nathalie Warmerdam, was one of three women (along with Carol Culleton and Anastasia Kuzyk) murdered in their separate homes in the Ottawa Valley in 2015 by one man, an ex-partner of theirs. Hopkins spoke to The Globe and Mail about collaborating with American composer Jake Heggie and Canadian poet-novelist Margaret Atwood to create the piece.