“I am a very, very local-based artist,” says the Contralto Rose Naggar-Tremblay one recent Wednesday. “I did all my studies at UQAM, at CEGEP Saint Laurent, at McGill. I was grown here.”

It is one of the charms of the rhapsody in two languages that is everyday life in this city: little traductions infidèles like this one. Naggar-Tremblay likely meant something like “born and raised,” but being neither above nor below a pun, “grown” seems apt enough to me — for a woman named Rose.

Verily, this Rose was grown in Montreal.

Although wandering is the theme of Naggar-Tremblay’s forthcoming recital at Bourgie Hall, entitled The Women Who Leave, a performance inspired in part by the artist Marisol, whose retrospective is currently on exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Particularly, Marisol’s world travels — at a time when the romantic notion of artist-as-wanderer was reserved mainly for men — resonated with Naggar-Tremblay.

“In the year before, I had been thinking a lot about moving, or wandering, or travelling women,” she says. “Just the ability of woman to be free in her movement. Marisol went travelling and came back with a completely different style of sculpting and painting that really embodied the notion of movement. I was a little bit stuck home during the pandemic, like everyone else. Actually, being stuck at home was for me the motivation to say, ‘no, I can’t spend my whole life missing opportunities.’”

Over the past two years, Naggar-Tremblay has been doing nothing but wandering, with stints working in Europe, singing the lead role in Bizet’s Carmen at the Edmonton Opera this past October, and returning home to perform with the OSM after winning top honours in their 2021 Concours competition. “It was extremely inspiring to work with Rafael Payare,” she says. “It was something very special. It was also evocative of travel.”

Naggar-Tremblay’s parents both immigrated to Quebec, her mother originally from Egypt, and her father born in Germany, the son of a military man. “I was raised with stories of abroad and of travel. Adventures. That was part of my imagination. Being drawn to travel, to the sea — those are things that I strongly identify with.”

In her preparatory explorations for writing The Women Who Leave song cycle, Naggar-Tremblay participated at the Museum in controlled mediation activities with groups of elderly women.

“We didn’t just appreciate Marisol visually;” she explains, “we also tried to use the same media that Marisol used to create our own little sculptures and paintings. And after these experiences, we would have a circle of discussion to evoke what she brought up inside of us. How we received her body of work and her tools of artistic expression. After these conversations, the poetry really wrote itself.”

At only 31, Naggar-Tremblay has already achieved admirable accolades. And she has done it her way. In addition to successes at the OSM, Naggar-Tremblay won the prestigious Georges Enesco Competition in Paris, came in second place at the Prix d’Europe, and was named Radio-Canada’s Breakthrough artist of 2022.

“Wherever I work, I always get rehired,” she beams, “and that’s a very special thing. I can make myself valuable to a house. But that is based on who I always was. I’m not trying to please anybody. For the couple of years that I did try to please, I was extremely unhappy, and I was unsuccessful.”

Naggar-Tremblay grew up dreaming of becoming an artist of some sort. But it took time to land on opera. “When I was a kid, I was doing everything,” she recalls. “Dance lessons, and singing, and piano lessons, and choir. As soon as I could, I joined theatre in school. I feared free time. I wanted to be busy, and I wanted to be doing things. Then I channeled that into opera because it’s an all-encompassing artform, where all of my skills could be used.”

The Classical repertoire was a large part of Naggar-Tremblay’s early musical influence. But more recently, she has embraced a Pop sensibility that manifests in her singer-songwriter side, on a recording called Je me souviens à toi.

“It’s a completely different use of my voice,” she explains. “I’ve always had this duel between being a Classical musician and wanting to be a singer-songwriter. I discovered Pop as an adult and I fell in love with it. Now I listen to Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, like everyone else. But when you’re a young Classical musician, you grow up in an obsessive bubble and there isn’t space for anything else. You train so hard. And then you open yourself up to everything else in the world and you think, ‘oh, I was so naïve.’”

I ask Naggar-Tremblay what advice she might give to her fifteen-year-old self. “I would say find your five-year-old,” she laughs. “The biggest danger is to stop listening to your little voice. To me, as a five-year-old, I was extremely creative, and I loved a lot of different things. That is what gave me the career I have now. I was very positive and curious. What makes you unique,” she states, “is also what’s going to make you find your niche.”

Undoubtedly, Naggar-Tremblay has found hers in spreading joy throughout the world with her voice. Naturally, she will be travelling again after her performance at Bourgie Hall, spending five months in Europe, doing a Strauss production in Toulouse and Wagner’s Das Rheingold in Germany, before returning to Canada to sing Verdi’s Requiem in Toronto. “It’s the longest stretch that I will be away from home,” she says.

Right now, though, Naggar-Tremblay is excited to present The Women Who Leave in Montreal.

“Marisol gives us the inspiration to create movement in our lives, maybe in smaller ways,” she tells me.

“It doesn’t have to be living on the other side of the world. It can just be, ‘maybe I’m going to do one thing for myself today, and that’s going to be my escape.’”◼︎

Rose Naggar-Tremblay performs The Women Who Leave December 13th 2023 at Bourgie Hall, 1339 Sherbrooke St West.

Cover image: Brent Calis