It’s a beautiful evening in Verbier, Switzerland, when I meet up with the singer and conductor Barbara Hannigan on the terrace of her hotel, perched on the steep hillside above this Alpine town. The mountains surround us, and the light makes them so clear that they almost look like a film set. Hannigan is at the Verbier Festival to conduct the opening concert, and that’s just one of a series of firsts we are to talk about.
“I’m Pleasantly Ecstatic”: Barbara Hannigan’s First Time in Verbier
It’s her first visit to Verbier – and I suspect it won’t be her last – she conducted a typically eclectic programme (Berlioz’s Carnaval Romain Overture, Haydn’s Symphony No 104, Copland’s Dance Symphony – another first for her! – Richard Rodgers’s Carousel Waltz and, a world premiere, At the Fair that she and Bill Elliott wrote together (drawing on a string a celebrated American songs and melodies). Her ensemble here in Switzerland is the Verbier Festival Orchestra, comprising 18-28 years olds, all who have their eyes set on a career as orchestral musicians. “It’s been a long time since I worked with an orchestra of young people, like an Academy orchestra,” she tells me. “I’ve worked with Juilliard and Royal Academy musicians but this is slightly different. One told me they just got a position in Houston and another in San Francisco. I guess the closest thing I can think of to this group is the New World Symphony in Miami. So it’s not completely foreign to me, but I’m pleasantly ecstatic because they’re so good, and they have so much energy. And they’re good with their energy.” She’s clearly had a lot of fun with them – and the energy was much in evidence at the concert. She brought the house down with At the Fair, singing, acting and conducting at the same time. And the young players were clearly bowled over by the experience, and totally in awe of the way she works.
When she arrived in Verbier, the Festival Orchestra had been there for a fortnight, coming together as an ensemble under the tutelage of Daniel Blendulf. But Hannigan had a very pleasant extra surprise. “What’s really nice for me is that there are four young conductors who are part of the Academy here, and one of them is someone that I’ve been mentoring for the past four or five years, Luis Castillo-Briceño. So when I found out Luis was here, I said, ‘Okay, I want Luis as my assistant for this week because I know him and we’re so comfortable with each other.’ He just won the International Conducting Competition Rotterdam, and he’s flying high from that! So he’s my luxury item!” she adds with a laugh.
Crafting a Programme: Joy, Danger, and Irony
I ask her about the programme she’s chosen. “It’s very festive,” she explains, “but there’s also a darker side to things. You’ve Berlioz’s Carnival, you’ve got the carousel At the Fair, in the Haydn there’s something like a barn dance – when people come together and celebrate, and of course the energy that happens when people do that. The Haydn Menuet always strikes me as one of those parties when someone comes along who’s a little bit dangerous, but fun but volatile. So, you know the party is going to end with maybe a fire or the police being called or a fight or something. And there’s this element in every piece.”
I ask, out of curiosity, what order she rehearsed the pieces. “I started with Roman Carnival – I always start a rehearsal with something I know, but I know most of the pieces on this programme. It was either going to be the Haydn or the Berlioz but that’s too small a group. So I started with the Berlioz, because it’s very fun for them to play. It shows what kind of chops they have – which are considerable. I mean, they can really play!”
At the Fair, her collaboration with the Broadway composer Bill Elliott, demands our attention. “This is the third collaboration that I’ve had with Bill,” she explains. “I first approached him in 2016 to write an arrangement with me of four songs from the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy. It was very collaborative – we did the arrangement together. Then the second thing that we did was Kurt Weill songs and Lost in the Stars – we love throwing ideas back and forth.” At the Fair is in three movements with the outer panels calling on her skills as a singing-conductor, but the central movement is purely orchestral. “In a way, that central movement is a commentary on America, on patriotism. What is that and what does it mean? And it’s also a commentary on madness and chaos, which we can translate into our world situation.I took inspiration from the second movement of Ives’s Three Places in New England as far as putting different pieces over top of each other, but with a lot more reference at the beginning to Bruckner and Mahler. Then we go into this mad chaos with tunes like Make Them Laugh, The March of the Gladiators, Colonel Bogey on Parade, Seventy-Six Trombones. But then also America the Beautiful and The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Needless to say it brought down the house – and 1400 people in the Salle des Combins in Verbier make quite a noise when they’re shouting and cheering. “I wanted it to be subversive! I said to the orchestra, this whole middle section, with all the marches and all the patriotism, in a way, is basically about Instagram. It’s about, ‘Hey, look at this. Look at this, look at this for 30 seconds, look at this for 30 seconds’.”
Watch the world premiere of At the Fair at the Verbier Festival.
Hannigan’s first outing as a conductor-who-sings was with Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre – it’s entered legend with the singer dressed as a schoolgirl whose every action has a double meaning – to animate the text, but also to energise the ensemble she’s conducting. “A lot of people misunderstood my schoolgirl outfit and though I was just being silly and making fun. I chose that outfit carefully. It was a couple weeks after Boko Haram sent the Nigerian schoolgirls into the square to freedom, and nobody suspected that a little girl in a schoolgirl outfit would be anything or have any resonance. You know why I chose that outfit? Because I thought she can get away with anything, you know? And it was exactly that angry side that Ligeti had in mind that I was trying to bring to that piece.”
Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre: Sir Simon Rattle, The London Symphony Orchestra and Barbara Hannigan
Mountains, Monsters, and Musical Marathons
The one “new-old” work Hannigan conducted in Verbier was Copland’s Dance Symphony, a work that is far darker than its title might suggest. “You know what it’s about?” she asks disarmingly. “It’s about zombies!” She explains the work’s genesis. “What happened was that in 1922, when Copland was in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger, his roommate was Harold Clurman, who ended up becoming a big movie director. When they were there they saw the film Nosferatu, and it made quite an impression. And Boulanger said to Copland, ‘Well, if you’re so inspired by it, why don’t you write a ballet on something like this?’. Clurman worked up a scenario that featured a sorcerer Grohg (who gave the piece its name). Along with dances of the adolescent, the opium eaters, the streetwalker, the beautiful young girl, there is a scene where Grohg opens a coffin brings the dead back to life to dance for him.”
The ballet was never performed. Copland withdrew it but reworked much of the material into the Dance Symphony. It’s a tough piece to play with some very complex rhythms. “The thing with this orchestra is that these young people are so good with rhythm. Nobody could believe how good they were at this. I’ll bet that the next time I do this piece, and the time after that, it will not come together as easily as it did with them. They’re amazing in the Dance of Mockery.”
Copland’s Dance Symphony, Barbara Hannigan conducts the Verbier Festival Orchestra.
The day after we talked, Barbara Hannigan was leaving Verbier to travel to the Tiroler Festspiele in Erl, Jonas Kaufmann’s festival near Munich, to perform another show in a run of Poulenc’s La Voix humaine (twinned with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle). “I jumped in to do a new production of La Voix humaine. So I was there for two or three weeks. We’ve had two performances. After my second performance I came to Verbier the next morning at 7am and rehearsed the following day. And after my concert here, I will leave here at 6am and go back to Erl and sing my last show there. Then I’ll drive to Munich and meet Bertrand Chamayou and we’ll drive to the Messiaen Festival au Pays de la Meije in the mountains in France where we’ll do our Messiaen-Scriabin-Zorn programme. So for me, it’s a little choc-a-bloc. But I don’t mind. It’s all great stuff!” Hannigan’s energy is amazing – after we parted she was off to the gym to do some rowing. It clearly worked because the concert next day set the town alight!
