Barbara Hannigan beguiles in Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital

Anyone with ears should feel honored to be alive in the time of Barbara Hannigan. The Canadian soprano returned to Philadelphia on 10th December after a seven-year absence, bringing a typically thoughtful and eclectic program to Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Since her last appearance, she lost her longtime musical partner, Reinbert de Leeuw, who died in 2020. Demonstrating her intelligence and good taste in accompanists, she brought along the fine French pianist Bertrand Chamayou, who proved every inch her equal in terms of style and grace.

Hannigan and Chamayou began with Messiaen’s Chants de terre et de ciel, which they also recorded together earlier this year. Hannigan’s interpretation sounded a bit cool on disc, her faithful adherence to the composer’s tricky vocal line and various leaps between registers eclipsing the multiple moods in the cycle. Not so live: here, she tore into the six songs with a quasi-religious fervor that reached a fever pitch in the closing entry, the ecstatic Résurrection.

Messiaen juxtaposed his devout Catholic faith with the joys of earthly life in this work, honoring both his wife and newborn son, and Hannigan brought a plaintive delicacy to those selections that contrasted the incantatory quality of the more faith-centered songs. In the end, she offered a full portrait of the composer’s spiritual and personal complexity, which Chamayou mirrored on the keyboard with daring and distinction.

John Zorn’s Jumalattaret functioned almost as a monodrama, demanding that Hannigan recite, chant and unleash various onomatopoeic sounds when not maintaining meticulously long-breathed vocal lines. Chamayou got off no easier – the accompanist must strum, pluck and pound the piano strings at various intervals, often while the soloist sings directly into the soundboard.

This may sound forbidding, but in the hands of two deeply committed artists, the experience was often overwhelmingly primal. Zorn took as his source material the Finnish epic Kalevala – the same work that fascinated Sibelius – and the varying shifts in musical style and vocal tone spoke to heroism one moment, pagan worship the next. Hannigan’s voice alternately sounded like a harpsichord, a theremin and a clarinet, but the ethereal beauty that characterizes her ethereal lyric coloratura never dissipated, even when tasked with the most gutturally emotive of utterances.

Hannigan magnanimously awarded a fair chunk of the 80-minute program to Chamayou, who performed Scriabin’s Poème-nocturne and Vers la flamme with a deep understanding of the composer’s mystical sound world. Although this may be the shortest program that PCMS offers this season in terms of length, I guarantee it is the one that will remain in my mind the longest.