Barbara Hannigan: 'You must go all the way’ - Telegraph:
Fearless Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is a Hitchcock blonde with a voice like no other. Having mastered the role of a paranoid hysteric, she is tackling one of the wonders of modern music.
There’s something about old-fashioned barnstorming virtuosity that never loses its appeal. All the biggest stars of classical music have it: think of Lang Lang, Pavarotti, Itzhak Perlman. We just love to see the seemingly impossible being carried off with bravura.
There’s a newish arrival on the classical circuit who has that same quality. She’s the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan. She does the kind of high-wire acrobatics with her voice that very few singers can manage, and she does it with a bravura that stops you dead in your tracks. All this is joined to a startling stage presence and cool blonde beauty that contrasts interestingly with the heat in her voice (think Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s film The Birds).
Hannigan could have had a great conventional career as a coloratura queen. But she’s an unconventional soprano, to say the least, as I discover when I catch her on a rare break at her home in Amsterdam. She’s just been performing one of the great classics of modern music, Pli selon Pli (Fold by Fold), Pierre Boulez’s setting for soprano and huge orchestra of some beautiful but obscure poems by Mallarmé. Next weekend she brings it to London’s Southbank Centre as part of a three-day survey of Boulez’s music aptly entitled “Exquisite Labyrinth”.
“I’d just sung it in Lucerne, and then the next day I had a day off in Zermatt,” she tells me. “I set off for a walk and I had the mountains in front of me, it was a beautiful day and guess what? I found I was whistling tunes from Boulez’s piece!”
Tunes? Come on now. This is modern music we’re talking about, so how can there be tunes? “Oh well, maybe that’s the wrong word. It’s just very beautiful in the way it unfolds. What I love about Boulez is the way the music is very strict in its structure but inside it’s beautifully fluid. It feels like I’m singing liquids of all different colours and viscosities, which are constantly changing.”
Does she need to know what the structure is before she can sing one of these thorny pieces? “Well, I think it’s important to try. I went to a six-hour seminar on the piece by a musicologist. It was fascinating.”
Not many performers attend analytic seminars on music. But one way in which Hannigan is just like every other virtuoso is in her steely determination. She was born in a little village in the depths of rural Nova Scotia, which turned out to be a very good place to develop her talent.
“There wasn’t much to do there and it was before the internet, so there were no distractions. We just got on with doing things for ourselves. Every household had a piano, so I just got into music and singing.”
Even before she was out of high school, Hannigan had signed up for a Fame-style singing-and-dancing school in Toronto. “I had a great singing teacher who introduced me to all kinds of music,” she says. “I went to the Toronto Symphony every night I could.”
By the time she was 17, Hannigan was getting young composers to write songs for her; two years later she was singing professionally. Postgraduate study followed in London and The Hague.
By now the musical world was starting to notice the young singer with the ability to pick any note out of the air and master complex rhythms. It wasn’t just tricky modern music she flung herself into: older forms of classical music from Handel and Scarlatti to Mozart were her other great love.
“To me, both kinds of music need the same kind of clarity. I just want to embody the sound, to make it come from the whole of me, and why should that be any different for Boulez or Bach?”
Some singers shy away from modern music because they’re afraid it will wreck their voices. Hannigan doesn’t see the problem. “I think Wagner is much more dangerous for voices, though one thing I would say is that you can’t practise it for long out loud. I do a lot of silent study, mapping out the performance. It’s like running a marathon – you have to figure out where the hills and plains are, where you can ease off a little, where you need all your strength.”
I wonder whether it’s a gymnast’s mentality that makes her focus on all this hard stuff? “Yes, I think that’s true. You know how in figure skating there was that triple jump everyone did, and then finally someone managed a quadruple one? Well, if I were a skater I would be that person! I have that Star Trek thing of going where no man has gone before.”
Hannigan’s best-known role is as the crazed Gepopo in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, where vocal virtuosity is used to suggest a character on the edge. “I’m supposed to be a paranoid hysterical chief of police, and in the score Ligeti writes, 'with extreme panic and hysteria’ and then in the next line, 'even more panic’ and finally, 'completely beside herself’. So you just have to go all the way.”
But right now it’s the forthcoming performance of Boulez’s piece which is on her mind. “Boulez is so great to work with. He’s always saying 'use the score as an opportunity to be free’, and he keeps urging us to make things less regular and more fluid.”
And that mathematical structure she learnt about in the six-hour seminar? “It doesn’t matter. The colour and drama and the deep emotion is what counts,” she says. “It’s there in the poetry, and in the music too.”
Barbara Hannigan sings Pierre Boulez’s Pli selon Pli at the Royal, Festival Hall as part of Shell Classic International London SE1, (0844 875 0073), on October 2
'via Blog this'
Fearless Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is a Hitchcock blonde with a voice like no other. Having mastered the role of a paranoid hysteric, she is tackling one of the wonders of modern music.
There’s something about old-fashioned barnstorming virtuosity that never loses its appeal. All the biggest stars of classical music have it: think of Lang Lang, Pavarotti, Itzhak Perlman. We just love to see the seemingly impossible being carried off with bravura.
There’s a newish arrival on the classical circuit who has that same quality. She’s the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan. She does the kind of high-wire acrobatics with her voice that very few singers can manage, and she does it with a bravura that stops you dead in your tracks. All this is joined to a startling stage presence and cool blonde beauty that contrasts interestingly with the heat in her voice (think Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s film The Birds).
Hannigan could have had a great conventional career as a coloratura queen. But she’s an unconventional soprano, to say the least, as I discover when I catch her on a rare break at her home in Amsterdam. She’s just been performing one of the great classics of modern music, Pli selon Pli (Fold by Fold), Pierre Boulez’s setting for soprano and huge orchestra of some beautiful but obscure poems by Mallarmé. Next weekend she brings it to London’s Southbank Centre as part of a three-day survey of Boulez’s music aptly entitled “Exquisite Labyrinth”.
“I’d just sung it in Lucerne, and then the next day I had a day off in Zermatt,” she tells me. “I set off for a walk and I had the mountains in front of me, it was a beautiful day and guess what? I found I was whistling tunes from Boulez’s piece!”
Tunes? Come on now. This is modern music we’re talking about, so how can there be tunes? “Oh well, maybe that’s the wrong word. It’s just very beautiful in the way it unfolds. What I love about Boulez is the way the music is very strict in its structure but inside it’s beautifully fluid. It feels like I’m singing liquids of all different colours and viscosities, which are constantly changing.”
Does she need to know what the structure is before she can sing one of these thorny pieces? “Well, I think it’s important to try. I went to a six-hour seminar on the piece by a musicologist. It was fascinating.”
Not many performers attend analytic seminars on music. But one way in which Hannigan is just like every other virtuoso is in her steely determination. She was born in a little village in the depths of rural Nova Scotia, which turned out to be a very good place to develop her talent.
“There wasn’t much to do there and it was before the internet, so there were no distractions. We just got on with doing things for ourselves. Every household had a piano, so I just got into music and singing.”
Even before she was out of high school, Hannigan had signed up for a Fame-style singing-and-dancing school in Toronto. “I had a great singing teacher who introduced me to all kinds of music,” she says. “I went to the Toronto Symphony every night I could.”
By the time she was 17, Hannigan was getting young composers to write songs for her; two years later she was singing professionally. Postgraduate study followed in London and The Hague.
By now the musical world was starting to notice the young singer with the ability to pick any note out of the air and master complex rhythms. It wasn’t just tricky modern music she flung herself into: older forms of classical music from Handel and Scarlatti to Mozart were her other great love.
“To me, both kinds of music need the same kind of clarity. I just want to embody the sound, to make it come from the whole of me, and why should that be any different for Boulez or Bach?”
Some singers shy away from modern music because they’re afraid it will wreck their voices. Hannigan doesn’t see the problem. “I think Wagner is much more dangerous for voices, though one thing I would say is that you can’t practise it for long out loud. I do a lot of silent study, mapping out the performance. It’s like running a marathon – you have to figure out where the hills and plains are, where you can ease off a little, where you need all your strength.”
I wonder whether it’s a gymnast’s mentality that makes her focus on all this hard stuff? “Yes, I think that’s true. You know how in figure skating there was that triple jump everyone did, and then finally someone managed a quadruple one? Well, if I were a skater I would be that person! I have that Star Trek thing of going where no man has gone before.”
Hannigan’s best-known role is as the crazed Gepopo in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, where vocal virtuosity is used to suggest a character on the edge. “I’m supposed to be a paranoid hysterical chief of police, and in the score Ligeti writes, 'with extreme panic and hysteria’ and then in the next line, 'even more panic’ and finally, 'completely beside herself’. So you just have to go all the way.”
But right now it’s the forthcoming performance of Boulez’s piece which is on her mind. “Boulez is so great to work with. He’s always saying 'use the score as an opportunity to be free’, and he keeps urging us to make things less regular and more fluid.”
And that mathematical structure she learnt about in the six-hour seminar? “It doesn’t matter. The colour and drama and the deep emotion is what counts,” she says. “It’s there in the poetry, and in the music too.”
Barbara Hannigan sings Pierre Boulez’s Pli selon Pli at the Royal, Festival Hall as part of Shell Classic International London SE1, (0844 875 0073), on October 2
'via Blog this'
