The BBC Music Magazine Interview
‘‘For me, my voice is in a peak place right now. I’m hungry to use it’’ THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
Barbara Hannigan, the groundbreaking Canadian soprano and conductor, talks to Kate Molleson
Barbara Hannigan’s quantum career leap came with a wig, latex and Ligeti. 2011: the Canadian sopranoturned-conductor strode onto stage in thigh-high PVC platform boots, shushed the audience, opened her mouth, raised her arms and proceeded to sing, conduct and utterly inhabit ‘The Mysteries of the Macabre’ – a scene from Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre in which a police chief inflicts S&M with brutal dexterity. It was Hannigan’s conducting debut, and she set the bar as high as her top notes.
That performance explains why Hannigan became muse to the world’s major composers. She calls them her
‘gang’: Sciarrino, Dutilleux, Brett Dean. Some she refers to with first names only: Gerald [Barry], George [Benjamin], Hans [Abrahamsen]. These composers have created new roles, often new sound worlds, around the high-wire allure of Hannigan’s voice and the way she lives the music with a take-no-prisoners authority. She has a megawatt package of charisma and control. Conducting was an inevitable extension.
We’re at her Paris home, an airy loft conversion in boho-chic Oberkampf where manuscripts line the room-length bookshelves and the kitchen is kitted out with the professional-grade knives Hannigan brings with her on tour. (Cooking is no fun in a rental apartment with blunt knives. First of several life lessons she imparts during the morning: always travel with knives.) She and her partner, the filmmaker Mathieu Amalric, split their time between Paris and Brittany, where Hannigan feels at home because it ‘looks like the east coast of Canada’.
Nova Scotia, to be precise. She grew up in a village called Waverley, where school was at the end of a dirt road and music lessons were a 40-minute bus ride into Halifax. Her three siblings are also musical, with a jazz-drumming twin brother and a sister who plays cello in Yannick Nézet
Séguin’s Orchestre Metropolitain. She reaches for a picture frame to show me her twin, holding out a fish he has just caught. ‘Here’s a tip:’ – second life lesson – ‘when you catch a fish, hold it out in front of you to make it look bigger in the picture.’
The crux of Hannigan’s prowess is her combination of virtuosic precision and hypnotic stage presence. The latter is what catches the eye and the headlines, but it wouldn’t mean much without the former. ‘I liked structure and discipline from the start,’ she recalls of her schooldays. ‘I remember being excited when a history teacher gave us a system for memory. I remember thinking: that’s a technique I can use forever. I’ve always loved technique!’
She moved to a performing arts high school in Toronto where she could study music theatre and dance as well as classical music. At 19 she was hired for her first professional gig as vocal soloist – a piece by Henry Brant called Inside Track. Hannigan is there on the 1990 recording, singing at an altitude only mice should be able to hear, but unmistakably her. ‘I was hired because the vocal part was so crazy high. It wasn’t hard; I just had the instrument for it. It’s the way my cords are shaped.’ She believes her voice hasn’t changed much since then, although ‘it got warmer, more mature, with life experience in it.’
While we’re on vocal technique: what’s the secret behind that exquisite high control? ‘You mean the thing where I start high from nothing with a straight tone, then sort of quiver? Well, I had two main teachers. One was Mary Morrison, who taught me the high, humming, spinning placement that has enabled me to do all those pianissimos out of nowhere.
Mary would ask what I wanted to work on in lessons. Other singers would want interpretation and big arias. I figured I could work out that stuff myself. I wanted the technique. Finding that equilibrium between length and width. Hours in front of her mirror, perfecting the placement of OOH and AHH and EEE.’
The other key teacher was Neil Semer, whom she still sees, and to whom she credits her bel canto chops. ‘I want to apply bel canto to [Zimmerman’s opera] Die Soldaten. Or to Gerald Barry. Or to Boulez – to Pli selon pli. Or to Ligeti’s Mysteries.
I learned all that music with Mozartian technique, then just sped it up. Sometimes contemporary music becomes a free-for-all and singers throw caution to the wind. That doesn’t serve the music, it doesn’t serve the composer, it doesn’t serve the tradition of singing. It also doesn’t serve the longevity and health of your own instrument.’
She talks passionately about silent learning, about travelling the contours of new music in her mind before ever opening her mouth. She mentions a new piece by John Zorn that is ‘so insanely hard I was working on it forever and I thought, “this is never going to enter my system”.’ What could someone possibly write that would stump Barbara Hannigan?
‘Oh, it didn’t stump me! It just took time.
It’s vocalise [wordless singing] – harder because there is no textural memory. And it’s really fast.’ She gives a demonstration, flinging out notes like a Catherine wheel.
In the end, she asked Zorn how accurate he needed the line to be. Answer?
Accurate! The anecdote brings us to the matter of composer egos, and how to deal with them. ‘Interpersonal relationships in such a subjective field…’ She pauses, re-crosses her legs. ‘Almost everyone in music doubts themselves because their contribution can’t be objectively quantified. Everyone is insecure. Some people become aggressive or become bullies, some abuse alcohol or drugs. I mean performers and composers. My methods for negotiation are different for
each composer. I approach them from the most compassionate place I can.’
She gives me the example of Hans Abrahamsen’s opera The Snow Queen, which she premiered in October. ‘We changed things up until and including opening night and went into it with things that hadn’t been addressed. Before the second performance, I wrote to Hans saying I had misgivings about my part. He wrote back saying he’d woken up in the night thinking, “I know you’re right”.’
In the case of the two operas by George Benjamin, there was no such to-and-fro. Written on Skin (2012) and Lessons in Love and Violence (2017) were both crafted for her voice, but the results are different. ‘He contained me in Lessons,’ she says. ‘He did it on purpose because my character, Isobel, is oppressed. He didn’t want me to be the star of that show. My first entrance is a G above middle C. He wanted to show her oppression in her voice. I said, “can’t you show her oppression through a high C?!”’
Now Hannigan treads a new line of precarious interpersonal dynamics from the podium. ‘Every orchestra has a different energy. It’s a big part of why I like to come back to certain ones: Gothenburg Symphony; Munich Philharmonic; my Dutch orchestra, Ludwig; Radio France.’ Has she been treated differently since becoming a conductor? ‘Not really. I was always more than just “the singer”.’
Occasionally, she admits, she has been tested by an orchestra. ‘Schoolboy behaviour,’ she calls it. ‘When you make music, you have to be open. You can’t protect yourself, so it does hurt. I remember Olly Knussen. When it happened to him, he would say: “we’re just going to go into our own little bubble”. You just have to make it to the first rehearsal break. That’s everything. I often used to call Simon Rattle during that first break. If I was having problems, it was usually because I was trying to be a “good” conductor. He would say to me, “just be the Ligeti girl”.’
Hannigan used to get told that she ‘sang like a conductor’, implying she led with her voice. ‘A lot of singers are late; you have to drag them along. I was always at the front.’ So she conducts like a singer? ‘Ha! I wouldn’t be so happy about being told that. But orchestras like it when I demonstrate lines. When I sing the violin parts, I’m up to C or D. That gets them laughing.’
She says she thinks dramaturgically about programmes. La Pasione, her latest album with Ludwig Orchestra brings together music by Nono, Haydn and Grisey – a typical Hannigan triptych spanning notions of ancient Greece, Gilgamesh and death. Other projects include Poulenc’s La voix humaine, and Gerald Barry’s Salome, due to be unveiled in Los Angeles in April 2021 before coming to London later in the year. She is singing and conducting both.
Meanwhile, she’s stepping back from some of her signature pieces. Abrahamsen’s Let me tell you was published with an exclusivity contract that only Hannigan would sing it – initially for three years, then extended to five. ‘I’ve withdrawn from singing certain pieces so regularly to let other people take them up: Dutilleux’s Correspondances; Written on Skin; Let me tell you. I’ve given lists to publishers specifying which other singers I think should be hired.’ She’s giving up her famous Krzysztof Warlikowski production of Berg’s Lulu, too. ‘By 2022 I’ll be done with Lulu. Running around in my underwear on pointe shoes? There comes a time.’
Does there? Hannigan says she needs to sing, that she doesn’t feel the same chemicals when she only conducts.
‘It seems to me that my brain and musculature fire connections based on how I sing. I need to sing in order to conduct a Haydn symphony.’ She also says she’s dismayed when she sees other singers retiring too early. ‘A lot of singers stop in their 40s. But I think the voice is good well into the 50s. Actually, I think at the later stage the voice is working in a way it has never worked before. For me, the instrument is in a peak place right now. I’m hungry to use it as best I can. It’s the decadence, you know? It’s the moment when you’re at the height just before everything starts to decay. It’s that point of fermentation when it tastes even better.’ Hannigan and Ludwig Orchestra’s ‘La Passione’ is out now on Alpha Classics
‘When you make music, you have to be open – you can’t protect yourself’