Photo by Raphael Brand
James Strecker: Since you’ll be performing in three concerts of the Toronto Symphony’s New Creations Festival beginning February 28, I wonder, first, how it feels to have festivals like this that celebrate the contemporary music to which you have dedicated much of your artistry. Also, how does it feel to know that not a lot of such music is programmed into the seasons of major orchestras?
Barbara Hannigan: Well, I love to know that the music I believe in is being played, and that audiences are moved by it. But frankly, the works I am performing here are indeed programmed into the seasons of major orchestras. The Abrahamsen let me tell you was a Berlin Philharmonic commission (our premiere was Dec 2013) and in its first two years I’ll have performed it with 10 major orchestras. Written on Skin has been performed at major opera houses all over Europe, and we have consistently experienced sold-out houses, even at Covent Garden in London, where we’ll return in 2017 due to popular demand. There is certainly a place for modern music. This season I’ll sing Vivier with Vienna Phil and Grisey with Berlin Phil, so I do think the modern pieces are being played by the mainstream organizations. Sometimes I need to work hard in convincing the orchestras to programme the pieces, but that is getting easier.
JS: The first concert begins with A Mind of Winter for soprano and chamber orchestra by composer George Benjamin, a gradually haunting work which, from my first hearing of it, seems to suspend the listener in isolation. What does the work mean to you as an artist and, if such separation exists, as a human being?
BH: A Mind of Winter is the only “new to me” piece on this festival and I am totally enjoying preparing it. You are right – it is about isolation, solitude, and about deep listening. It makes me think a bit of Glenn Gould and his love of the Canadian North. There is a process of crystallization which I feel within it, and also a very human problem, that of loneliness.
JS: In the second concert, you’ll be singing Let Me Tell You by Hans Abrahamsen, an orchestral song cycle in which Ophelia from Hamlet “tells her story.” You premiered the work in Berlin just over a year ago and have performed it maybe eight times since, so how has your relationship with the work developed since then.
BH: This work fit me like a glove from the moment I started work on it. I remember opening the score and weeping for joy and something else, I don’t know what. I sang it from memory at the very first rehearsal with orchestra, and that was necessary, for me, but very scary. Now I feel as if I am improvising the piece, as if I am telling the story with a freedom -and accuracy, I hope- which only enhances the intimacy and poignancy of her story. And I love to perform it with different orchestras and conductors because every group is different and every conductor brings something special and new to it.
JS: Henri Dutilleux and Evelyn Glennie each once explained to me the process of letting a piece they composed or premiered, respectively, then go off into interpretations by others. How do you feel about a work like Let Me Tell You or Written on Skin having a life without Barbara, especially since you had so much to do with their birth?
BH: Indeed, both pieces are very personal for me. But what I wish for them is only that the other eventual singers will give them the care and attention that I did, and that they trust the scores. This is very important. The score doesn’t need “interpretation”, it needs to be bathed in light and seen.
JS: How have you become aware of new dimensions of being female over time through the roles and compositions you’ve taken on? How does such awareness make its presence known in your everyday life?
BH: I don’t think about being female, as a musician. Not very often, anyway. In music we are more like “creatures”, and even when I play a character like Lulu, known to some as a femme fatale, I do not think of her like that. She was neither seductress nor victim, she was much more than that.
JS: I’m also looking forward to George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin which world-premiered in Aix-en-Provence, Britain-premiered at the Royal Opera House in London, and will Canadian-premiere in Toronto on March 7, all with you as Agnes. How is Written on Skin an important work, first of all for you and secondly for an average opera audience, if there actually is such a creature?
BH: I think it’s better that I don’t try to answer that in too much detail -who was it that said that “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture?” The piece’s success on so many levels speaks for itself. The staging is incredible and we will give the North American staged premiere this summer in New York. But even concertante, especially because we have the staging so deeply in our psyche as singers, it clearly is a powerful story, almost like a thriller.
JS: What should the audience give of themselves at this performance of Written on Skin?
BH: Well, they, like we, are witnesses. So listen, look, be open.
JS: What kind of training does one singer need to do both Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre? Are we dealing with the same vocal issues and the same issues of temperament in the performer in both cases?
BH: Absolutely, it is the same technique for all singing. One could never sing Ligeti or any other contemporary composer without the technique to back it up.
JS: What standards of personal integrity do you bring to a decision to perform a new work?
BH: Hmmm, I never thought of it like that. I am drawn to the composer’s voice, and the urge to collaborate together can come about it so many different ways. I am a muse for them, during the creative process, and later, as I learn and prepare to give the score its “birth” and bring it up through childhood, I become the composer and so many other references, as I give light and breath and voice to the page. The path I have been on these last 20 years is sometimes not easy – one doesn’t know what one will get- and it is risky, therefore, to agree, sight unseen, to give world premieres. Sometimes, right up until the premiere, I don’t know how I feel about the piece. And at other times, I am 100% consumed by it, heart and soul, from the moment I receive the score. It is an exciting path and a responsibility. If I only was performing music that has been tried and true, it would be a very different life.
JS: Does contemporary new music reflect the contemporary world, does it evolve from that world, does it lead that world?
BH: I think all music can reflect society and our contemporary world.
JS: In your experience of the more traditional repertoire, how does one keep the work fresh with its original life energy, all while bringing individual imagination to it and without violating the original in some way?
BH: I think the secret is always to go from the score, not from tradition or convention.
JS: You do conduct while singing and I wonder, as you do, how each benefits and what each might lose from these two persons in one. One gain I suspect is that, since you take the music through you as a singer, you can offer an inspiring presence in voice not available from most conductors. Please fill me in.
BH: This is hard to explain, because the audience only sees the finished product. First rehearsals with the orchestra are very different than where we end up in performance. Even though the body of the orchestra can be large, we try to achieve a kind of chamber music. The players have more responsibility than usual, and it works well. I have to be careful with my voice during these kind of programmes, as speaking to a large group and singing the repertoire takes a lot of my vocal energy, and I can find my voice much more tired than if for a “normal” concert. So, I try not to speak too much!!
JS: Some reviewers, at least as far as I’ve seen, tend to describe your performances in enthusiastic language that reaches beyond the complacency of habitual response to classical music and more into surprise. You seem to go places that one doesn’t see that often in concert hall performances. Since the word risk is common among artists, I’d like to know how that notion fits into your life as a performer. Or does it?
BH: Risk – yes, an important factor. Risk, realizing that things may not turn out as one might have expected, for better or worse. These kinds of collaborations are fresh air for all of us – onstage and in the audience.
JS: What do you find fruitful and what do you find difficult in dealing with students of voice and how do you find an effective means of communication with them?
BH: Last summer I gave masterclasses at the Luzern Festival, as part of my residence there as “Artiste Etoile” there, and was working with a hand-picked group of wonderful young artists. This was ideal for me since they were there to work with me and all were focused, prepared, eager, and open-minded. I think working with each person is different and we need to find the key to what works for us. With some singers, I want to communicate on a very abstract level and, with others, be very specific technically.
JS: You’ll be returning to Toronto on October 7 and 8 of 2015 in your Canadian conducting debut. Any comments?
BH: Looking forward!
JS: Finally, allow me to take this leap. From watching your performances as a conductor-singer, especially with your playful and physically articulate presence on stage, I suspect that you are leading us to future concerts where we as the audience will get up and move and dance to the standard classical repertoire as we listen to it. Does this make sense to you or is my morning coffee doing some kind of hallucinogenic stuff on me?
BH: You need to drink less coffee.
JS & BH: (Laughter)