Barbara Hannigan

Hannigan breaks with the tradition and practice of classical music. Léonie Sonning’s Music Prize 2020 is right where it should be. Singer and conductor Barbara Hannigan gives body to both new and old music, and it is quite clear that she can do what she wants… ..Hannigan conducted with all sorts of physical gestures, with fencing arms, small fingertips, cleats, with her face hidden in his hands.

Let me say that when the love-damaged, abandoned Elle, as the woman in the opera is called, began to conduct with blows to the head in existential despair, there was a hole in this reviewer who was flushed by these tremors that art can rarely evoke. For all time, Hannigan can keep one right there in the ironic distance, where we are both served the full expression, but also with the full control and the small distance from artist to character that exhibits the character so extra heartbreaking. After all, Elle is in all her clinging to her lover who has slipped, a little bit childish, right? Can’t she soon realize that the world is changing, that she has gone into mental dissolution, and that she just needs to let go and move on to the next love metamorphosis? She can not. But Hannigan can. As a singer, Hannigan plays her character in the full form of the body – to execute her in a parallel track as conductor with Poulenc in the music’s big bathtub.

One can only believe that it is both brave, beautiful, strong and violently impressive to stand in front of an orchestra without a score and conduct a 40-minute work, where you yourself sing the constantly talking lead role.

(Camilla Marie Dahlgreen, Dagbladet Information)

Why is she doing this, Barbara Hannigan? Insist on taking the different and otherwise well-defined roles and merging them? The simple answer is: because she can! She can, because nothing goes by the floating delicious and airy creaminess of her voice when she sings heavy notes while leading the orchestra. She can, because she is in physically good shape, allowing her to stretch, twist and turn her body into plastic expressions that let us see the music as it runs through her. And she can, because the time is right. Who else says that a soprano is an interpreter who has to stand nicely next to a man who starts the symphony orchestra and directs things? We saw Hannigan in DR’s concert hall already in 2016. Even then she sang and conducted at the same time. Sibelius was it, and the audience stood up and clapped.

(Thomas Michelsen, Politiken)

Hannigan controlled the antics with sure hands – and legs, one is tempted to say – and she demonstrated that she is physically in top shape. In some situations, there was almost acrobatic balance art on the podium, and it was clear that she had an overview of the events. It became even more impressive in the concert’s second and three-quarter length work – Francis Poulenc’s opera in one act “La voix humaine” (The Human Voice). As the title might suggest, this work has only one role – a woman involved in a phone call. The opera was composed in 1958 over a play by the French poet and multi-artist Jean Cocteau and has become a Hannigan specialty. On the large screen behind the orchestra you could follow her facial expressions during the “conversation”, and on a side screen it was possible to follow the lines in terms of a fairly full translation into Danish. Here, the musical octopus appeared convincingly in all three roles and even played with the possibilities that the video screen gave her – it all seemed timed and organized, and there was even room for a certain (bitter) sweetness. She is truly an extraordinary musician with completely unusual qualities, and she has sought new paths in the communication between orchestra and conductor. It was a Thursday concert that you will not forget right away. It’s healthy to get a little shaken up in the conventions – even if there is something charitable about moving forward along the music’s wide avenue.

(Peter Dürrfeld, Kristeligt Dagblad)