Combining top skills as a soprano specialising in contemporary music and as a conductor who also sings from the podium, Canadian musician Barbara Hannigan is changing our idea of what can be accomplished on a concert stage.
Barbara Hannigan (Photo by Cyrus Allyar)
In her speech given at the Lucerne Festival in 2016, Hannigan spoke about coming from the small village of Waverley, Nova Scotia, and the day the new music teacher arrived. Miss MacEwan, a Juilliard graduate, was in her first teaching job and taught her students singing. At the same time, she taught them how every listener feels a piece differently, and they learned focus and discipline through preparing for concerts, competitions, and musicals. The elements she learned as a child formed the basis for her development in the profession.
As a singer, she’s performed in the premieres of nearly 100 compositions, bringing her faultless voice to bear on works including Written on Skin by George Benjamin (2017); La plus forte by Gerald Barry (2007); let me tell you by Hans Abrahamsen; Split the Lark (2022) and Star Catcher (2022) by John Zorn; and Je ne suis pas une fable à conter (2023) by Golfam Khayam. Her 2024 recording of John Zorn’s Jumalattaret, a song cycle in praise of Finnish goddesses from the Kalevala, was eagerly awaited, and she’s currently touring with it.
As a conductor, she has a neat, precise style, and as a singer, she’s equally involved with the music. The combination of her two skills is so natural, you wonder why more conductors aren’t singers!
During COVID, she conducted the London Symphony Orchestra and sang in a beautiful rendition of Samuel Barber’s ‘lyric rhapsody’, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, based on a short prose piece by James Agee.
Barbara Hannigan sings and conducts Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915
She made her name first with Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, which required a consummate performer in a role full of theatrical flair that required a virtuosic voice.
Barbara Hannigan (Photo by Marco Borggreve)
She is known for her performance of Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine, a one-act, one-character opera where the dialogue is conducted with an unseen ex-lover on a telephone. She recounts her life in lies – her previous evening was not spent going out with her friend Marthe, but rather with having her life saved by Marthe from her suicide attempt. The telephonic link between the former lovers is frustrated by problems with wrong numbers and dropped calls. The work is a tour de force for soprano, and in a recent performance with the Filarmonica della Scala, she conducted the orchestra, while also singing the part, solving the problem of which way to face with a concurrent video.
Barbara Hannigan debutta con la Filarmonica della Scala: “La voix humaine” in versione multimediale
As part of her outreach to those beginning their careers, she founded Equilibrium Young Artists. Students who have finished their training and are in the first substantial phase of their professional careers are given support. Hannigan views equilibrium as a state of balance, saying in 2016 that ‘Any great performance is a sacred equilibrium achieved between all the characters involved: singers, instrumentalists, conductor, composer, text, audience’. Equilibrium wants to help young artists further their professional development, elevating their total musicianship and discipline, offering projects with leading orchestras and ensembles and to accomplish this, Hannigan brings young artists into her performance realm, working with them as colleagues.
Barbara Hannigan
We’ll close with a double shot of Hannigan as singer and conductor of cats. Marie-Nicole Lemieux & Barbara Hannigan perform Rossini‘s Duetto buffo di due gatti with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.
Marie-Nicole Lemieux & Barbara Hannigan perform Rossini’s Duetto buffo di due gatti with the OSM
As an artist, Hannigan surpasses her colleagues both as a singer and a conductor. She makes the most difficult repertoire accessible and part of everyone’s musical soundscape.
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