BARBARA HANNIGAN AND BERTRAND CHAMAYOU HOLD VANCOUVER SPELLBOUND
Barbara Hannigan (soprano), Bertrand Chamayou (piano): Music of Messiaen, Scriabin and Zorn, Chan Centre, November 30, 2024.
Photo by Luciano Romano
Celebrated Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan has been busy with international commitments in recent years, and her debut for the Vancouver Recital Society was more than overdue. Fortunately, as part of her ten-concert North American Tour with the wonderful French pianist Bertrand Chamayou, this recital of Messiaen, Scriabin and Zorn proved fully life-affirming. Interestingly, it took place just a week or so before Taylor Swift was to arrive for the final concerts of her Eras Tour. I have little doubt this concert upstaged anything the pop icon might have on tap, though we might not want to tell the Swifties that. Hannigan was just named 2025 Artist of the Year by Musical America. Besides her well-known vocal precision, agility and range, what made the recital fully suspending was Hannigan’s ability to choreograph a narrative line that communicated immediately to the listener and drew one so strongly into the intimacy of her expression.
The most familiar Hannigan piece was the Messiaen song cycle, Chants de Terre et de Ciel: she has already recorded it for Alpha. While the composer originally set these six songs for a ‘grande soprano dramatique’, Hannigan’s lighter vocal presentation proved as telling: what it might have lacked in heft, it likely compensated for with a more intricate and subtle characterization of each song and a more flexible response to emotional extremes. Dating from 1938, the cycle is largely contemplative and is a testimony to both Messiaen’s devotion to Catholic mysticism and his love of his first wife, Claire Delbos, and Pascal, their son. The last two songs are noteworthy in moving from morbid darkness in ‘Minuit pile et face’ to passionate exaltation in ‘Résurrection’. Hannigan and Chamayou proved masterly at finding the right balance and flow for the cycle.
I seldom get entranced simply by a singer’s virtuosity, but Hannigan’s ability to move between her vocal registers is so fluent and her ability to expand to top notes is so facile and perfectly terraced that I was disarmed. There is also much tenderness and personal feeling present, and lovely dramatic shape to her lines. She literally inhabits what she is singing and astonishes by just how many subtle emotional layers she reveals. The opening ‘Bail avec Mi’ alighted on a searching melancholy, while the following ‘Antienne du silence’ secured a wonderful purity of line. In ‘Danse du bébé-pilule’ it was her animation and dramatic control that informed, while in ‘Arc-en-ciel d’innocence’, it was the splendid vocal architecture, the adoption of an almost soliloquy style and the rounded lyrical shaping. In the last two songs, where the angularity and insistence of the piano writing is notable, Hannigan’s dramatic force and involvement with the text was stunning, especially in the closing ‘Résurrection’.
The venue’s engineers picked a very open, reverberant acoustic for this presentation, which allowed Hannigan’s high lyrical passages to float out more ethereally – indeed, very entrancing – but it also produced a substantial overhang on the piano notes and some congestion at the strongest volumes. The reverberation suited Messiaen’s characteristic quest for timeless ‘blocks’ of sound, and Chamayou sustained notes beautifully, imparting the right sense of space to them. When it came to Scriabin’s ‘Poème-nocturne’ and ‘Vers la Flamme’ that Chamayou performed on his own, I might have liked a tighter acoustic so the pianist could find more of this composer’s mercurial element. On the other hand, the necessity of deliberate speeds did allow many of Scriabin’s chords and motives to be sustained in roughly the same way as the Messiaen, and we all know Scriabin had mystical leanings too. I think that was the unifying idea. I enjoyed Chamayou’s traversal, but it still seemed a particularly French Scriabin.
John Zorn has long been a revered American experimental composer, and his collaboration with Hannigan, which started about a decade ago, has proven to be a real meeting of the minds. The song-cycle Jumalattaret, which received its New York premiere in 2019, is a central collaboration, and is based on the Finnish national epic, Kalevala. As Sibelius originally showed, the text offers a wonderfully fertile source for musical constructions built on mythology, nature and folklore.
There are two evident characteristics of this piece. On one hand, it is forbiddingly difficult from the technical perspective. It forces the singer to negotiate incredibly abrupt dynamic extremes while producing a variety of unusual sounds – from bird chirps and squawks, to screeching and exotic types of vibrato and phrasing. Virtually none of these could be executed by lesser singers. There is also ‘theatre’ present: the singer claps and beats her chest and, occasionally, turns and hisses inside the lid of the piano. In fact, the pianist himself must access a substantial number of notes from inside the piano. On the other hand, there is Zorn’s lyrical/rhapsodic underpinning – always pushing forward through the piano’s touching arpeggiated sequences – that gives the work a natural motion and a genuine simplicity and beauty. It is a remarkable combination, and I might add that the contribution from Chamayou’s piano was beautifully sensitive and idiomatic.
There are many dramatic moments in this work, some of them strange and slightly bizarre, but what impressed me overall was how well Hannigan commanded the lyrical side of the piece alongside all the pyrotechnics. She was able to shape her high lines and secure her top notes with natural ease and exceptional melismatic control, yet she found so much emotional variety. One sometimes noticed the innocence and wonder in the expression; at other times, it was the feeling of tenderness; and at still other times, it was a sensual dimension, Hannigan acting as almost a seductress. At no point was there any lapse in the artist’s concentration. The work moves to its close through forest and air spirits, then turns to the goddess of the sea. At very end, the singer spreads her wings, finding arching lyrical lines which are so beautiful and ethereal that it is like a dream that goes on forever. It is only when she reaches into the piano, pulls out a little bell and strikes it softly that the work ends.
We have not seen a vocal recital as accomplished and emotionally suspending as this for many a year! The ecstatic audience response was intriguing, since it was achieved with fully modern repertoire that most attendees would not have known. Which only goes to show how compelling the Barbara Hannigan experience can be!
© Geoffrey Newman 2024