I’ve seen so many concerts recently, I would have neither the time nor the energy to write about all of them. But Tuesday night’s appearance by Barbara Hannigan, at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts’ Perelman Theater (courtesy of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society), was extraordinary, astonishing, transformative. There really is no one else like her.
The program, presented without intermission, was bookended by two song cycles. Olivier Messiaen’s “Chants de Terre et de Ciel” (“Songs of Earth and Heaven”) of 1938 is a 30-minute confessional on poetic texts offering insights into the composer’s domestic love and Catholic faith. As much a method actor as she is a vocal artist, Hannigan projected herself right into the heart of this intimate score, assimilating its hopes, doubts, and moments of ecstasy.
In fact, she sang with such nuance and commitment, it had the paradoxical effect of lulling me into a kind of complacency, if such a thing is possible in the presence of artistry of this caliber, as I expected her usual high standards when she returned to perform John Zorn’s “Jumalattaret” of 2012. But she pulled the rug right out from under me, knocking me back on my heels, as she took things to a whole other, unanticipated level. I don’t know that I will witness a performance quite like it ever again.
“Jumalattaret,” inspired by “The Kalevala” (the Finnish national epic that informs so much of Sibelius’ music), praises nine goddesses out of Sámi shamanism: Päivätär, goddess of the sun; Vedenemo, mother of waters; Akka, queen of the ancient magic; Louhi, hostess of the underworld; Mielikki, the huntress; Kuu, moon goddess; Tellervo, forest spirit; Ilmatar, virgin spirit of the air; and Vellamo, goddess of the sea.
Hannigan delivered the opening invocation as almost a cooing sprechtstimme. As the cycle progressed, she also employed or engaged in birdlike vibrato, Queen of the Night scat-singing, diaphanous humming, and possessed laughter, all the while having to focus on clearing the work’s many polyrhythmic hurdles. I hasten to add, it was not all style over substance: with equal skill, she unfurled passages of ethereal beauty.
Yes, she smacked her palms, thudded her chest, and enacted what I can only compare to the once common practice among children of clapping their hands against their mouths in Indian “woo-woo” fashion. But these gestures transcended gimmicky and reached to the primordial roots of the source material. You can always count on Hannigan to bend and blend technique and effect to the service of storytelling. A passage in which she begins with a hush, her voice blossoming unhurriedly, so that you can feel every petal unfold, will gently hairpin into a controlled decrescendo al niente that is as seamlessly executed as it is mesmerizing.
In the program notes, she claims that the demands of the score initially stumped her. That’s saying something, for a singer who has seen and done it all. Not just done, mind you, but MASTERED. She reached out to Zorn to see if there might be some concessions they could make so that she might actually be able to perform his music. Somehow, he convinced her to just go for it. Hannigan shares some of their correspondence. Zorn wrote, “One cannot transcend anything by staying on safe ground. And it is in these intense moments that we can find deeper truths, bringing mind and heart together – and begin to understand the soul and its workings in that courageous moment of letting go and going for it, the music will become alive in a special way – a way that is beyond the notes on paper.”
As astonishing as her performance was, I find it even more so that she would even have to be told this, as Hannigan always goes for broke. The score must have seemed beyond human capability. All the same, on Tuesday, she walked the tightrope between laser-focus and hurling-herself-into-the-void abandon.
Certainly, Hannigan has had her forebears in avant-garde specialists like Cathy Berberian, Lucy Shelton, and Meredith Monk, all courageously exploring extended techniques, but I don’t know that any of them employed the entire tool kit with such facility. In uncanny precision and otherworldly beauty, Hannigan is like a human theremin.
The last time I saw her live was as Gepopo in György Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” with the New York Philharmonic in 2010. She has lost none of her voice, and if anything her technique is even more astonishing.
Zorn’s piano writing ranged wildly in its shifting time signatures from dissonant complexity to what I can only assume is meant to be folk-like simplicity. To me, it sounded like a cross between Vince Guaraldi and Mark Isham.
He also employs an arsenal of inside-the-piano effects pioneered by composers like Henry Cowell (stroking and plucking the strings, banging on the wood, and inserting objects) and George Crumb (the soprano singing into the strings). Toward the end of the cycle, Hannigan produced a tiny suspended cymbal from inside the piano and struck it with a minute stick.
Furthermore, Hannigan’s creative collaborator for the evening, Bertrand Chamayou, forwent the traditional music stand, preferring to read the scores from where he laid them open, also inside the piano, on the strings.
The two song cycles were separated by a pair of piano pieces by Alexander Scriabin: “Poème-nocturne” (“Night Poem”), Op. 61, of 1912, and “Vers la flamme” (“Towards the flame”), Op. 72, of 1914. These were no mere palate-cleansers. Rather than divert, they maintained the keen interest aroused by the Messiaen, and they were absorbingly presented.
Lights at the back of the stage emitted different colors during each of the pieces – red for Messiaen and blue for Zorn – not inappropriate for a program constructed on music by composers sensitive to the effects of synesthesia (a neurological phenomenon in which different tones trigger sensations of color).
Granted, it was a rainy, foggy Tuesday night, with accidents and traffic jams everywhere, and new music can be a hard sell, but I was flabbergasted that the hall was not packed. The downstairs was near-full, and the first balcony respectably so, but the seats around the back of the stage were empty, save for I think one person. Where I sat, on the second balcony, with all the lonely old men in beards, we were all involuntarily social distancing.
But it is still an intimate hall (of 650 seats), and Hannigan’s charisma, intensity, and daring sent electric shocks to the bleachers.
PHOTOS: The blurrier ones at the bottom are mine; the one at the top is an authorized photo taken at the Teatro di San Carlo by Luciano Romano
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