My review of the upcoming album Electric Fields from Barbara Hannigan and friends is now up at myscena.org.
Catalogue information: Alpha Classics ALPHA980
Electric Fields
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Barbara Hannigan with Bertrand Chamayou at Koerner Hall
Thursday evening saw one of Barbara Hannigan’s comparatively rare Toronto appearances. This time it was part of a ten city tour with pianist Bertrand Chamayou. It was a three part programme with no intermission. First up was Olivier Messiaen Chants de terre et ciel. Like the better known Poèmes pour Mi these are reflections on family and religion.
Barbara Hannigan – Messiaen
Barbara Hannigan’s latest recording project is a CD of Messiaen’s vocal music with pianist Bertrand Chamayou. It’s very much an equal partnership with some superb musicianship on display. It starts off with two cycles written for/inspired by Messiaen’s first wife. Chants de Terre et de Ciel celebrates the marriage and the birth of their young son. There’s some very dramatic singing here but what really stood out for me was Hannigan’s ability to float a note with perfect control and apparent ease. It works beautifully with the more delicate parts of the piano part.
Infinite Voyage
Infinite Voyage is billed as the final album from the Emerson Quartet capping a long and illustrious career. It’s also a collaboration with Barbara Hannigan so it’s perhaps not surprising that it includes music by Berg, Schoenberg and Hindemith though Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle belongs to a rather different style.
The disk starts with Hindemith’s Melancholie, Op.13. It’s quite a sparsely scored piece and Hannigan’s treatment of the text is interesting and quite individual. There’s a rhythmic flexibility, almost caressing the words. It’s especially marked in the third stanza “Dunkler Tropfe”. I’m not familiar enough with the piece to judge how unusual Hannigan’s treatment is or isn’t but I think it really works.
Fuoco Sacro
Fuoco Sacro is a film by Jan Schmidt-Garre. It’s subtitled “A Search for the Sacred Fire of Song” and was inspired by Schmidt-Garre’s passion for Italian singing of a slightly earlier era rekindled when he heard Ermonela Jaho on his car radio. This led him to explore how certain singers create something more than “just singing”. In the film he does this by following the lives of three singers; all women (he clearly doesn’t believe that men have this elusive “sacred fire”) and all very different. They are Ermonela Jaho (of course), Barbara Hannigan and Asmik Grigorian. Now these are all singers about whom I have strong opinions and that may colour my view of the film. You have been warned. What follows concentrates on what I think the film tells us about its three principals. The film does this more by show than tell with lots of performance and rehearsal footage as well as interviews.
Sehnsucht
Sehnsucht is the title of a new CD from Barbara Hannigan and friends. It features three works in new arrangements for voice and chamber ensemble. Hannigan sings Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder in an arrangement by Reinbert de Leeuw. Baritone Raoul Steffani sings the Vier Gesänge Op.2 in an arrangement by Henk de Vlieger. There’s also a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No.4 in an arrangement by Erwin Stein. The eleven member Camerata RCO is conducted by Rolf Verbeek.
Gimeno and Hannigan
To Roy Thomson Hall last night for the first time in over two years to see Gustavo Gimeno conduct (my first time) with Barbara Hannigan featuring in a major premiere in the first half. The concert kicked off with a 3 minute piece by Julia Mermelstein; in moments, into bloom. It was over too quickly to register much of an impression with me. I certainly enjoyed the Stravinsky Scherzo fantastique that followed. This seems to be Gimeno’s type of music and he had excellent control of rhythm, dynamics and colour which augured well for The Firebird coming up after the interval.
Barbara Hannigan is the Snow Queen
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.
let me tell you
Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you is a work for orchestra and soprano setting text arranged by Paul Griffith from Ophelia’s lines in Hamlet. It was written for and dedicated to Barbara Hannigan who recorded it in 2015 (I think) with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Andris Nelsons.
It’s a piece in seven sections of varying moods expressing different aspects of Ophelia; both in the play and in the afterlife of the character in paintings etc. Generally the music sits on the fractured edge of tonality with a melodic line that owes something to folk music. Sometimes it’s extremely slow with a bassy, brooding air and other times it’s bright and busy.
Streaming round up
Here’s a quick list of new (relatively) and upcoming web content (the obvious Youtube channel unless otherwise specified):
- Massey College have a “Music Salon” up. It features Ian Cusson and Rebecca Cuddy with Métis musicologistRena Roussin discussing the role of Indigenous art music in the Canadian music scene with a particular focus on the Métis. In between the talking head sequences there’s the performance of Ian’s Five Songs to Poems by Marilyn Dumont that was webbed by Soundstreams a little while back. If you are the one reader of this blog who has not yielded to my encouragement to explore these songs please get on with it!
- Barbara Hannigan has a music video of Weill’s Youkali with theLudwig orchestra. (Alpha Classics channel). Cool footage of Finisterre which might not exactly evoke Youkali but it’s pretty much my land of dreams.
operaramblings 