Barbara Hannigan is sat in her garden warming her hands with a cup of tea, in between practice sessions. We’re reminiscing about her work with Pierre Boulez, ahead of centenary celebrations next year. In 2011, Hannigan and Boulez toured Pli selon pli, his seminal cycle of voice-and-orchestra settings of Mallarmé – it would be the last major orchestral tour of Boulez’s life.
“I remember the problems Boulez had with his eyes, he couldn’t see very well,” Hannigan tells me. “Having to blow up the score to a size he could actually read, having to re-mark his entire score, how distressing that must have been for him… No one can do that but you: every musician has their own special way of marking.” The piece, assembled from multiple movements composed in the late 1950s, has a hugely intricate orchestral score. “My scores are full of everything he said, with his initials by it and the date that he said it. Someday, some archive is going to get those scores. It was a very precious experience.”
“There was something also very romantic about it,” Hannigan adds. “Old-school romantic. Not between me and him, but between us and the music. We were finding this sensuality and romantic quality in the music, and he really loved that.” Boulez’s music has often attracted an unjust reputation for coldness – associations these performances did much to dispel. “I remember the reviews. They talked about the sensuality of Boulez’s music, and I thought ‘yes, of course!’ People seemed surprised by it, but what are you surprised by? This is flesh and blood here.”
“I felt like the piece became a kind of strange opera – with those extraordinary texts of Mallarmé’s,” Hannigan says. “There’s a photograph of me coming off stage in London, after the very last concert. I still remember that moment, I get a bit choked up from it, because I knew that was it, that we weren’t going to perform together again… It was a life-changing experience, that tour.”
From January, Hannigan joins the London Symphony Orchestra for a series of performances. Sir Simon Rattle returns to the orchestra to conduct Boulez’s Éclat – a piece related to Pli selon pli – as well as the world premiere of a new concert arrangement of music from Sir George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence (created specially for Rattle’s 70th birthday). Hannigan reflects on portraying the rancid character of Isabel of France in a concert setting: “She’s not a nice person. For the whole opera, Isabel has a gin and tonic in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But when you sing it as a concert piece, you have to find a way to present it so that nobody makes the mistake of thinking that it’s me. That her values could be my values.”
Hannigan’s concerts with the LSO in March display her distinctive personal stamp – and a profusion of modern, classical and contemporary repertoire. “My programmes usually have some dramaturgy to them. One programme is very much living in the mythical. We have Debussy’s Syrinx, from Pan and Syrinx; we have Sibelius’ Luonnotar which is from the Kalevala; we have Vivier’s Orion, which is in the stars; we have Haydn’s Symphony 39, very Sturm und Drang-y; and we have Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin, which funnily enough is not about the Mandarin himself – that piece is really about a young woman.
“They shouldn’t even have called it Miraculous Mandarin – it’s really about a woman living with two men who want her to pretend that she’s a prostitute, to stand in the window and make gestures to draw men into the house. The last person that arrives is the Mandarin, and she starts to dance: she becomes almost possessed. It’s so much more about her! That programme is truly a mythical programme: it’s dealing with the supernatural, what we think of as magical powers. It’s dealing with that which is beyond us as humans.”
Iranian composer Golfam Khayam’s Je ne suis pas une fable à conter (“I am not a fable to be told”), for voice and orchestra, commissioned by Hannigan, is also performed in the UK for the first time. “I met Golfam as the result of an occasion when I was speaking in support of Iranian culture. This poem is pre-revolutionary, by Ahmad Shamlou, I sing in French and Farsi, and the text was translated by the famous filmmaker Marjane Satrapi, with help from Mathieu Amalric. It’s saying: I’m not a fable, I’m not a myth, I’m not a story, I’m real, I’m something that we all are. It’s a very powerful piece.”
Placing modern music in a rich, evocative context would seem to be a hallmark of Hannigan’s programming. In March, Hannigan also performs with baritone Stéphane Degout. “That’s my country/city programme – like city mouse vs country mouse. Roussel’s Festin d’Araignée and Ravel’s Histoires Naturelles: the composers at this time, Roussel and Ravel, they had these conferences on animals! There’s stuff even in English – Erik Satie wrote a piece for Vanity Fair, in English, on animals! Roussel was writing music for the filmmaker Jean Painlevé, one of the first filmmakers to film spiders, insects, underwater animals.”
These pieces are contrasted with Britten’s Les Illuminations, to a text by Rimbaud. “Rimbaud is negatively comparing the city to the freedom of the jungle, the freedom of the wild. The idea that the city is much more wild and dangerous than the jungle,” Hannigan says. “Then the final piece is Haydn 104: his last, fabulous symphony. It’s kind of city-country within itself: the last movement of Haydn 104 is a barn dance–” Hannigan immediately starts singing Haydn’s raucous finale. “It has this kind of ‘harvest festival’ sound.”
Haydn’s dramatic approach to concert music would seem to make him a composer after Hannigan’s heart. “I’ve probably talked about Haydn too much! On most of my programmes, he’s there. As a singer, I wasn’t so fond of his vocal writing – but I love his symphonies. He was writing a lot of incidental music for the theatre, and these movements would end up in his symphonies.”
Being ever-inquisitive and keen to learn new repertoire is an ethos Rattle held to as well, Hannigan says. His musical presence was important at the time of her transition to conducting. “Of course, Simon returns to repertoire that he loves, but he’s also always curious about new pieces. At the beginning he was always pushing me to learn more music – I said, ‘I’m learning so much music, my brain is going to explode!’”
Boulez, too, had importance at that time, while they were touring Pli selon pli. “I was about to make my conducting debut, and I remember talking about it to Boulez, at dinner after the show. At first, I was afraid to say anything, but when I told him he didn’t even bat an eye. I was talking about doing Renard by Stravinsky, he just said: ‘Yeah, watch out for that tricky part at the end.’ He didn’t think it was strange at all that I might be conducting.”
Hannigan has also done much to introduce and advocate for composers – particularly the music of Claude Vivier. “At one point, Simon said to me, ‘Are there any pieces that you’d really like to do?’ I said: ‘We should do Lonely Child.’ He said, ‘What’s that?’ We did it with Vienna Philharmonic, believe it or not! Pretty amazing.” Rattle remains an important port of call for Hannigan: “I don’t always follow his advice – but I do listen to it!”
“And actually, I also didn’t tell Simon that I was going to start conducting,” Hannigan says. “I think he called me about something else, while I was rehearsals for my conducting debut. I said ‘I’m in Helsinki’, and he said ‘What are you doing in Helsinki?’ I said, ‘Oh, Renard by Stravinsky’ – of course, there’s no female singers in that piece. He said, ‘Oh! Look out for the tricky bit at the end.’ Just like Boulez said!”
Barbara Hannigan performs with Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO on 9th January 2025 in London. She conducts the LSO on 13th, 19th and 20th March.
This article was sponsored by the London Symphony Orchestra.
