As written, Hans Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen is a fairly dark piece that cleaves pretty closely to the original Hans Christian Andersen story. The production at the Bayerische Staatsoper (in an English version adapted by Amanda Holden from the original Danish) and recorded in Munich in 2019 takes it to a new level of complexity and darkness. Director Andreas Kriegenburg has added additional avatars of the children Gerda and Kay to the scene creating three Gerda/Kay pairings. There are the children as children played by actors. There’s an adolescent pair played by mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson as Kay and an actor, Anna Ressel, as adolescent Gerda and a forty-something couple played by soprano Barbara Hannigan as Gerda and actor Thomas Graßle as Kay.

The magic mirror fragments that cause Kay to lose all joyful and positive thoughts are mirrored in adult Kay who is in hospital in a near catatonic state incapable of any kind of emotional attachment and painfully distanced from his desperate partner. In the various preludes and interludes that are interspersed between segments of story telling in the opera we see Hannigan desperately trying to reconnect with her estranged partner. It’s a powerful parallel to the main narrative and one that anyone who has had to deal with severe depression may find deeply disturbing. I did. In the end though, adolescent Gerda’s tears melt the mirror fragments and we see the three couples appropriately rediscovered as playful children, adolescents experiencing first love and an older couple finally, passionately, recovering what they had lost.

There are some other felicitous features of the work. With both children sung by women’s voices, Abrahamsen creates contrast by making the Snow Queen a bass role. It’s sung powerfully here by Peter Rose who doubles as the Reindeer and the Clock. Katarina Dalayman’s darker tones also provide contrast as the Grandmother and Finn Woman.

It’s a wonderful score. It uses a kind of colourful minimalism that dances around the edges of tonality to create sound that feels like it was laid on with a palette knife. There’s also a device akin to leitmotifs where certain patterns recur in association with people things or events but usually with something extra layered on. So there’s a tendency for the music to get denser as the piece progresses. Most of the vocal writing is fairly straightforward but, of course, Gerda’s music is the exception. It’s a typical Hannigan part with very high sections and some serious vocal gymnastics. Rose (especially as the Reindeer), in contrast, gets music that’s often extremely deliberate and slow.

Performances across the board are strong but the Hannigan/Graßle dynamic dominates. It’s not just that Hannigan has a lot to do vocally she’s often physically hyperactive too and required to perform feats of considerable athleticism. Graßle, by contrast, barely moves but still manages to be enormously affecting. Dalayman, Rose and Wilson are all strong and there are effective cameos from Caroline Wettergreen and Dean Power, as the strangely ethereal Princess and Prince, and Kevin Conners and Owen Willetts as a noisy pair of crows. The house orchestra, chorus and ballet all have major roles to play and do so very well while conductor Cornelius Meister produces a very coherent musical whole out of this complex score.

The recording on Blu-ray is top notch visually and sonically. It comes with a couple of extras; an animated short and a time lapse recording of the light show that featured on the house facade during the run. The documentation is comprehensive and very useful in this case. My only criticism would be that Christoph Engel’s video direction sometimes becomes over busy and close up dense. But, all in all, it’s an excellent translation to disk.  Subtitle options are English, French, German, Danish, Japanese and Korean.

In summary, this is a new work of high musical quality taken to new dramatic levels by Kriegenburg’s production and a talented and committed cast.

Catalogue information: Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings BSOREC2002