Songs for Murdered Sisters Receives U.S. Orchestral Premiere • January 2025
Philadelphia, PA & New York, NY
When his sister, Nathalie Warmerdam, was murdered, baritone Joshua Hopkins set out on a journey to use his voice to wake people up to the global epidemic of gender-based violence – and their part in it. His call to action was answered by two exceptional creators: Jake Heggie and Margaret Atwood.
Released during the pandemic as a film and Juno-nominated album, Songs for Murdered Sisters will now receive its long-awaited U.S. orchestral premiere. Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads The Philadelphia Orchestra in performances of this impactful work at Philadelphia’s Marian Anderson Hall on January 9 and 11, 2025, and New York’s Carnegie Hall on January 15, 2025.
Financial Times: ‘It’s the only way I can honour her’: Joshua Hopkins on singing for his murdered sister
WHYY: Philadelphia Orchestra to premiere ‘Songs for Murdered Sisters’
Globe & Mail: Hopkins and Songs for Murdered Sisters, created by Atwood and Heggie, head to Carnegie Hall
Photo by Curtis Perry
Critical Acclaim
Photo by Chris Lee
“The result is transformational. On a technical level, Heggie's simple, graceful melodies and harmonies, and clear, delicate orchestration, heard through Hopkins' warm, mellifluous singing, turned Atwood's mundane words into the loveliness and complexity of song. Yet they seemed to take the unimaginable pain of the murders into something that could hold and display the insoluble emotions of it all in a place that could be controlled by both Hopkins and the listener. There was a wonderful precision in the music and the performance, the ability to show something important and also dangerous with transparency and honesty, while being the master of it. Far more than the pop-psychological notion of closure, this is how people can hope to carry grief, which never goes away.”
–New York Classical Review
“With his warm and expressive lyric baritone, Hopkins immediately commanded attention, delivering a deeply personal and highly impassioned performance. Shading his voice to convey a range of emotions - bewilderment, fear, regret, loss, anger, and resignation - he moved about the stage as he sang, turning his back to the audience in the interludes, as if his grief was too personal to display. His whisper-soft delivery of ‘Empty Chair’, the first (and shortest) of the songs - ‘Who was my sister / Is now an empty chair / Is no longer / Is no longer there / She is now emptiness / She is now air’ - was heartbreaking. By contrast, he all but roared through ‘Rage’, as he voiced the desire to end the life of the man who killed his sister. The gently voiced final song of acceptance, addressed to Nathalie - ‘When I am singing this song for you / You are not empty air / ... You are here with me’ - brought the cycle to a peaceful end.”
–Classical Source
“Mr. Hopkins used all the changes demanded by Mr. Heggie. Here were declamations, here were leaps down an octave. Nor did he stand still. He walked across the stage, turned his back to the audience, returned and used his resonant skill to produce a most revealing personal grief.”
–ConcertoNet
“Hopkins offered an impassioned performance, shading his essentially lyric instrument to convey anger, grief and resignation. In the cycle's fourth song, Dream, he slimmed his voice to a near-whisper, finding an almost childlike simplicity in the fantasy that his sister might still be alive in some alternate reality. By contrast, he thundered through the penultimate poem, Rage, projecting with operatic fury the desire to end the life of the man who permanently altered his own.”
–Bachtrack