When Les Arts Florissants, the redoubtable Paris-based period ensemble, comes to Toronto for a performance of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen on July 11, it will bring back home a Torontonian – for a brief period, at least. Georgia Burashko, Toronto-born and raised mezzo-soprano now living in Paris, is the only Canadian in Académie du Jardin des Voix, the troupe of singers and dancers auditioned bi-annually for a specific production that is rehearsed in William Christie’s historic estate in Thiré, France. (You can visit the gardens virtually or book an in-person visit this summer on the Les Arts Flos website.) After premiering locally, the productions tour the world until the bookings run out, and this Purcell has been booked well into 2025, with Brazil as a recently added destination. Just before the North American leg of the tour, Les Arts Flos performed at Milan’s La Scala.
“I auditioned!,” is what Georgia Burashko tells me when I ask her how she ended up in the 2023 cast of Jardin des voix. We spoke yesterday, as she was preparing to fly to a friend’s wedding in PEI. (“I’ve been so busy this last year in Europe, I’ve missed all my friends’ weddings! Finally, I get to attend one.”) The young Toronto mezzo has seen her career stall during the total and prolonged COVID shut-down of performing arts in Canada in 2020-21, so she looked to Europe, where musical life found ways to continue. And, upon reflection, she relocated - like many dozens of Canadian musicians before her. She comes from a musical family (Art of Time’s Andrew Burashko is her father, and her mother and her step-dad, she tells me, are also musicians) but as a Canadian on the European continent, she has had to forge her own connections and make her own opportunities.
“I feel very lucky to be part of a project like this: it’s exceptionally feel-good, creative, full of imagination,” she beams. “It’s just magical.” Don’t expect a neat storyline, though: The Fairy-Queen was composed in 1692 as a set of musical interludes between the acts of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the score for which was lost after Purcell’s death and remained undiscovered until the early twentieth century. Musical interludes, or masques, were often unrelated to the main spoken text and did their own thing. The version in this production is all-music, all-dance, without the spoken verses.
“There are 14 of us, 6 dancers and 8 singers, and we're all on stage the entire time,” says Burashko. “We all dance and sing at a certain point, the boundaries are blurred.” The production has toured Utrecht, Bremen, Luzern, Madrid, Valencia, Luxembourg, Lugano… a lot of which were early music festivals. Most of her performing schedule, I note, is taken up by HIP and early music. “Oh, deciding to go back to school during COVID and take an Early Music MA program in The Hague was a great decision,” she says. “I feel so happy that I did that but I do feel a lot of heartache to be away from home. But I have representation in North America and I'm working here more and more. Last December, for example, I did Messiah in Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. It was nice to come home.”
Next year’s schedule will be more balanced between period and modern orchestras for Burashko, who moved permanently to Paris with her boyfriend in November last year. “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t been there for more than five consecutive nights, but I think it's a sound move.” We talk a bit about the old question of whether Canadian singers who want a sustained career have to move to Europe. “I think if you’d like to have a career in Canada, you really have to say yes to everything,” she says. “You can specialize in Europe, I think - you can focus on Handel or just sing Wagner or Mozart and be known for that. Not so much in Canada and the US.”
After she moved to the Hague, Burashko immediately started singing with the Netherlands Bach Society. The Dutch love their Bach, and she’s learned a lot about performing Bach but also contemporary music, another important component of the musical life there. Her first all-Dutch recital tour recently wrapped up, a DIY project for which she did all the jobs herself. She created the program, an English language fare spanning Baroque to Vaughan Williams, Dolly Parton and her friend Danika Loren, and was her own tour promoter, booker and producer. It was exciting, she says, but also exhausting. It was she who ran the soundcheck, planned the schedule, carried sets and costumes—and did everything she could to make sure that her colleagues in the small accompanying orchestra were having a good time.
If she were to do it again, it would be with a tour manager–but carefully curated recitals with the dramatic or spoken word components is probably where the future of the recital is. “I think I was probably unconsciously inspired by Art of Time concerts, or wanted to see what I was capable of,” she says. “I wanted to make something that was approachable; music had to be varied; and it couldn’t be too long.”
How does she find living in Europe as a freelance musician – is it easier, is the cost of living there a lighter burden? “Yes, it's easier there,” she says. “There’s more work.” Rents are I expect more manageable than in Toronto, Vancouver or NYC? I tell her that my query about a 1-bedroom in a non-fancy mid-town building recently got back a response citing $2,600 a month. “Paris itself is probably not much cheaper! I live in a one-bedroom and it's 1800 euros, which comes to about the same.” You have a functioning public transit and can hop on a train between gigs, though? “Yes! It looked incredible to me as a Canadian to be in different cities every week, travelling around for work by train, all over Italy, Switzerland, Germany.” It’s not all utopia, she is quick to emphasize; it’s a lot of hard work and paperwork, but if you become a part of an ensemble like Les Jardins des voix, you immediately get great exposure and a great platform.
At first she had a Dutch visa from school, and is now on a French visa—you still need to have a country-specific work visa to work in the EU as a Canadian musician. “It wasn’t so hard to get it, because Les Arts Florissants sponsored me. My partner works with a French group who sponsored him - for five or six years.” To renew a visa, a musician needs to show that they work enough in that country to warrant the extension. “Governments change, as we’ve seen, and things can become more complicated.” She has a lot of friends in the UK who, post-Brexit, have to deal with a huge amount of paperwork for the contracts that came to them smoothly just a few years ago.
What’s coming up in her schedule? “A lot more Bach, for a start. Lots more travel. More auditioning for stage work; I’m really interested in stage roles, it just so happened that I got busy with concert work and chamber music in the last two years. My next step is really focusing on opera… but the calendar fills up the way the universe wills it!” After a short vacation in August, Burashko will turn her attention to a project with the Netherland-based Australian-born composer Kate Moore who is working on a song cycle for Burashko stemming from a music-infused walk she’s done along the river Thames. Medieval instruments will be involved. “We're doing a very big tour and it sounds like she's composing one or two movements this year and then this project will continue many years into the future and expand. She just got back two days ago from hiking and walking with her instruments.”
While baroque music is now practically standard repertoire in Europe, medieval music remains an under-explored territory, she says, “a bit less taught and less performed.” Moore and Burashko bonded over a common interest in medieval music but it’s no wonder: a number of musicians with a penchant for contemporary music are reviving Hildegard von Bingen’s opus, notably Barbara Hannigan and Emily D’Angelo. “It’s my passion too, something I want to explore more,” says Burashko.
After Toronto, The Fairy Queen continues on to Joliette (QC), Tanglewood (MA), Caramoor (NY) and will make a stop in London for the BBC Proms.