Let me tell you

[knight66]

Let me tell you
Composer Hans Abrahamsen, words Paul Griffiths, Soprano Barbara Hannigan
Bayerischen Rundfunks Orch, Andris Nelsons, on the Winter and Winter label

A new songcycle that seems to me to be a masterpiece. But can it enter the repertoire?

Most great songcycles yield to some possibility of permitting different voice types to advocate them. There are some exceptions such as Strauss's Four Last Songs. But here, you need a high wire soprano who can cope with microtones. I cannot imagine the piece being transposed; it would destroy the orchestral sounds and textures. So very few singers will be able to advocate this piece; which does not make it any less compelling or important. But I doubt that you will get much opportunity to hear it live.

This group of songs uses the words of Hamlet's Ophelia extracted and reordered to provide a much more richly textured character: someone who can represent women and their experiences widely and deeply. The soundworld is tonal, but without a firm key. The orchestra kept reminding me of glass, evoking white light. Much of it lies high, it shimmers. The words are drawn from Shakespeare, the sounds often echo Monteverdi. Abrahamsen deploys a repeatedly struck note and word like the earlier composer did to hit home words or emphesise a point. That trait is most evident in the initial and then the final movement. There is melody, not long and sinuous, but transitory, snatched and short breathed. Yet, it does not feel fragmented, this is a deeply satisfying listen.

It is spellbinding music, moving and disolving like a mirage. The final movement fades away rather like the end of Das Lied. Without echoing Mahler, I neverthless kept thinking of the disolve at the end of the 9th Symphony.

The performance seems splendid; this singer is very much under the skin of the piece and has the technique to manage the extraordinary difficulties that have been stitched into it. Nelsons pulls out lots of layering and detail, though I have no idea what else it might sound like, but assume he serves the score faithfully, how would I know? But the orchestra sounds terrific.

At only just over half an hour it feels like an expensive disc......until you hear it.

Mike

[Karl Henning]

Great write-up, dude!  Thank you.

[North Star]

Great write-up, dude!  Thank you.

+1

Here's Hannigan talking around the piece, and a trailer bit of her concert recording with Nelsons & BPO:

https://www.youtube.com/v/IxKkRWTiWDo

https://www.youtube.com/v/cJNfpPoM3ug

[Mandryka]

I have heard this music, and I have a recording which I can easily put on symphonyshare if anyone wants it. When I first heard it, I  thought of Peter Lieberson, and of John Adams, and of Strauss's last songs, and Mahler/Wagner songs too and Szymanowsky and late Grisey  too - it has a sort of lush colourful decadent feel. The music is very relaxing to hear, IF (and this is a big IF) you still enjoy music which is, more or less to my uneducated ears, tonal.

I am sure the BPO, who commissioned it if I remember right, were thrilled by this piece, which seems tailor made to please and to stimulate the traditional concert going audience, without discomforting at all.

[Brian]

Hasn't Bruce seen this live recently? Penny for his thoughts, too!

Yours, Mike, are of course very appreciated. This sounds like a very interesting work.

[betterthanfine]

Oh my, I am a big admirer of Hannigan's work, and this seems like another winning performance. And the music! It's really glassy, icy. Spellbinding is the right word to use here, Mike. Thanks so much for bringing this recording to our attention.

[knight66]

Thanks guys, I hope others enjoy it. I was not put off by the singer's Youtube explanation of what the piece meant to her....but I almost was. What a load of arts-psycho-babble. My advice would be to give that a body swerve and allow her to speak through the music rather than about it.

I have listened to it about six times now and am hearing new things all the time. Hannigan is a great vocalist, but if you want to understand the words, follow the leaflet in the disc folder. Some of this is the extreme tessitura of much of it, but actually, she does not really do a great job at projecting the words. However, I don't want to take anything away from the piece or the disc. I have now read some reviews of the concerts: laudatory in tone, all of them.

I have the cycle that Lieberson wrote for his wife and have never really got on with it. It simply does not leave an imprint on me. I feel this current set of songs is more substantial.

Mike

[betterthanfine]

Did you know Hannigan before hearing her perform this piece? She's quite an interesting singer, and in my opinion she's very intelligent and knows what she's talking about most of the time. I watched that video you're referring to as well, and actually found what she had to say intriguing.

This is one of her signature pieces:

https://www.youtube.com/v/sFFpzip-SZk

And another performance with Rattle:

https://www.youtube.com/v/vmCmrZfybPQ

[knight66]

I had heard of her, but as far as I recall, never heard her singing. Fine if you enjoyed her explanation.

Mike

[Camphy]

Available online for a couple of weeks:

http://www.radio4.nl/plaatpaal/503/let-me-tell-you-hans-abrahamsen

[knight66]

It will be good to watch it, thanks.

Mike

[Monsieur Croche]

Let me tell you
Composer Hans Abrahamsen, words Paul Griffiths, Soprano Barbara Hannigan
Bayerischen Rundfunks Orch, Andris Nelsons, on the Winter and Winter label

A new songcycle that seems to me to be a masterpiece. But can it enter the repertoire?

Most great songcycles yield to some possibility of permitting different voice types to advocate them. There the piece being transposed; it would destroy the orchestral sounds and textures. So very few singers will be able to advocate this piece; which does not make it any less compelling or important. But I doubt that you will get much opportunity to hear it live.

Mike

I listened to the first little bit on Y-- you know, 'that' tube, and found it, as you said, extremely lyric, tonal and if I did not come away from that brief bit thinking 'beautiful,' it is quite pretty/lovely sounding. I will have to give it more, the whole thing -- but sense it might not be my cuppa tea, at least completely.

The piece won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award, which says something by way of approval, and while those awards are for composers from any and anywhere, I don't see them as any more a reliable index of future 'great works in circulation' any more than the American Pulitzer Award for music.

As to singers who can do this work, I instantly thought of Susan Narucki who is a generation ahead of Ms. Hannigan. Indeed this work could have, literally, been written for Ms. Narucki. As good as either of those two singers are, they are not in the least the only sopranos in the world who can sing this sort of work, or microtones, not that they litter the ground, mind you, but there are enough... enough to make 'no worries' about scarcity of who can perform it.

If the work gets a demand either via orchestras wanting to present it or singers having it prepared to offer to orchestras, that should be enough to keep it well afloat.

It seems to me 'accessible'-- in the extreme -- in a way that I think it is already near to patently general audience friendly.

[bhodges]

Hasn't Bruce seen this live recently? Penny for his thoughts, too!

Yours, Mike, are of course very appreciated. This sounds like a very interesting work.

Sorry, I just found this thread! Interesting comments, all around, and Mike has now heard the piece 5 more times than I have. Barbara Hannigan did it with Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra two weeks ago at Carnegie Hall, and I was mightily impressed. (So were many in the audience; it's been awhile since I've seen such loud ovations for a new piece.) The orchestra played magnificently: though I don't know the score well (yet), the amount of detail they captured was astonishing. Abrahamsen is a vivid orchestrator, among other talents, and the colors summoned up were impressive. And how Hannigan nailed some of those notes with such accuracy - notes that are seemingly plucked out of nowhere - was a mystery.

She is one of my current favorite singers, after seeing her in the Ligeti mentioned above, Gérard Grisey's Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil (Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold), and in George Benjamin's opera, Written on Skin.

--Bruce