McGill graduate Jingjing Xu is the 2024 winner of the prestigious Mirjam Helin Competition held in Helsinki, Finland. The Montreal-based, Chinese mezzo-soprano says that competition selections such as Saariaho’s “Attente” and Ravel’s “Le paon” maximized her opportunity to demonstrate different styles and vocal colours. The first song “contains long notes that must be performed straight-tone and with long crescendi or decrescendi, (in order to) depict stillness and loneliness,” she notes. In a completely different vein, the Ravel required her to narrate the courtship of a peacock! Xu approaches singing from an imaginative standpoint, celebrating how “it creates a spiritual world…