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DVD REVIEW | Barbara Hannigan Documentary Highlights Discipline and Preparation

By Paul E. Robinson on June 13, 2015

BH-docu
On this DVD, Barbara Hannigan takes on this dual role with the excellent Mahler Chamber Orchestra in a concert recorded live at the 2014 Lucerne Festival.

Barbara Hannigan: Concert and Documentary. Music by Rossini, Mozart, Fauré and Ligeti. Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Barbara Hannigan, soprano and conductor. Accentus Music DVD ACC 20327 (Total Time: 71:38 (concert). 51:17 (documentary)

Barbara Hannigan, born in Nova Scotia but domiciled these days in Amsterdam, has astonished audiences everywhere with her tour de force performances of György Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre in which, dressed as the lead character (shiny black miniskirt and stiletto boots) she simultaneously sings and conducts this fiendishly difficult score. Classical music has never seen anything like it and this new DVD captures this phenomenon brilliantly for the ages.

Ms. Hannigan is, by any standard, an extraordinary musician. As a soprano, she specializes in contemporary music and has come to be associated with major works by Berg, Ligeti, Dutilleux, Lindberg, Unsuk Chin and George Benjamin, but she has also had rave reviews for performances as Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In Canada, she has premiered several ‘soap operas’ by Torontonian, Alexina Louie and she has taken Canadian music to the capitals of Europe, recently as soloist in Claude Vivier’s Lonely Child with Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic.

One can see/hear Hannigan singing Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre – actually, excerpts from the opera Le Grand Macabre – with Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic on YouTube; while this is a terrific performance, the piece works surprisingly well with Hannigan as both soloist and conductor. On this DVD, she takes on this dual role with the excellent Mahler Chamber Orchestra in a concert recorded live at the 2014 Lucerne Festival. At one point during the proceedings, a familiar figure leaps up on stage and shouts “What the hell is going on here?” Simon Rattle, no less.

Elsewhere in this concert CD, Hannigan plays a dual role again, this time in arias by Mozart. She sings not a note, however, in Rossini’s La scala di seta Overture or Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande Op. 80; the consummate extrovert in Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, in these works she is a model of conductorial restraint. She conducts without a baton, scarcely ever moves her feet and often limits herself to wrist movements. One surmises that she gets what she wants through hard work in rehearsal and a total focus on the music during performance. Pierre Boulez comes to mind as a possible model.

No doubt about it, Ligeti’s Mysteries was the highlight of this live concert, but his very early Concert Românesc was a delightful surprise. These were renderings of some Romanian folk dances that were at times uncommonly beautiful and at others thrilling, in the manner of Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsodies. Hannigan and her players gave the piece the full virtuoso treatment with concertmaster Thomas Gould fiddling as though his life depended on it.

In the documentary segment on this CD, we get a sense of Hannigan’s incredible self-discipline as she prepared for this Lucerne Festival concert. She articulates an important lesson for itinerant artists: to maintain your sense of well-being, you must make your travelling home as much like your real home as possible. With this principle in mind, she travels with her kitchen knives – don’t ask how she gets through airport security – so that she can prepare food just the way she wants it, and she maintains a jogging regimen just as she would at home. She enjoys a glass of wine on tour and no doubt she also has fun now and again, but discipline and preparation are her priorities.

Barbara Hannigan has often appeared with the Toronto Symphony and recorded the Mahler Fourth Symphony with them in 2008. She’ll be back with the TSO several times next season, first on Oct. 8 then again for concerts Jan. 27, 29 and 30, 2016. For more about Hannigan visit her website at www.barbarahannigan.com.

#LUDWIGVAN

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