We will be there live from the Danish Radio concert hall in Copenhagen Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductors, singers Barbaras Haniganas in a concert of which the promoters say: “The great Barbara Hannigan is back with music where strong feelings collide with heavenly visions. Erotic longing shines through the vocal work of Claude Debussy The chosen lady of a love so intense that it unites heaven and earth. And that’s the general theme of the whole concert.”
In the program:
J. Haydn Symphony No. 49 in Faminor (Passion)
C. Debussy Cantata for soprano, contralto, female chorus and orchestra La damoiselle élue (“The Chosen Lady”)
Soloists – Johanna Valrota (soprano), Anna Lašsone (mezzo-soprano),
G. Ligeti Lontano (“Far Away”)
O. Messians Suite for symphony orchestra The Ascension (“Ascension”)
In the intermission of the concert – an interview with Barbara Hannigan
A wonderful program with four different composers and at the beginning of the program – Joseph Haydn. Haydn is one of the composers you have conducted several times. What attracts you to this 49th Symphony?
First of all, I will tell you what this program means to me – it is a path from the underground to Paradise. With Haydn’s Symphony No. 49, we begin this journey from the underworld, a symphony of mourning and lamentation. It is a look at the lost.
How do I feel about it? Surely everyone knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. I see the orchestra as being in the Underworld, where dead souls reside. I do not want to say that it is Hell, but rather the realm of Aaron. And there is also Eurydice, still alive, but on her way to the realm of the dead. She has hope to survive because Orpheus has come after her to bring her out of this underworld she doesn’t yet know. Their death has not yet fully taken hold. And she’s there with all these souls wondering what happened and where am I? And this is how the concert will begin. With this Haydn’s 49th Symphony Passion and this feeling. After that, of course, the symphony will pass storm and stress in the mood, because it is one of Haydn’s symphonies of that time period, in which Haydn did not spare syncopations, accents, emotional bubbles and outbursts of anger, and we can hear this in the 2nd and 4th parts of the symphony, where the orchestra plays with wild energy, excitement. This is a very strong start.
What role does the harpsichord play in your view of the symphony?
The role of Eurydice.
The harpsichord solo means exactly her – Eurydice. Wandering through these caves where dead souls live, there is darkness all around, and I ask the harpsichordist of the orchestra to personify Eurydice, playing as if “out of time.”
I didn’t want to give him any specific tempo cues or framework, but I wanted him to play in the spirit of free improvisations. Much like jazz musicians do when they flow into an orchestra.
Do you also see any invisible signs in this score? Hidden things?
Yes! I have deciphered everything that is hidden. Maybe a harpsichordist shouldn’t play so freely, but maybe he SHOULD play in a free manner? We don’t know that. But I like this status of discovery and curiosity – what was it really like there?
Haydn is followed by a piece that is very rare in the concert repertoire – Claude Debussy’s cantata for soprano, contralto, women’s choir and orchestra “The Chosen Lady”. As a singer, have you ever sung it yourself?
I have sung this cantata once in Madrid. And I have conducted it in New York. This is a very rarely performed work by Debussy. And it is a work influenced by the poetry and paintings of the pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rosetti. It has a similarity with Debussy’s opera Peléas and Melisande. Mélisande is a role I have sung many times in the opera. In Debussy’s cantata “The Chosen Woman” we go to heaven. The mezzo-soprano begins his song with words that describe the place and tells of a young woman in heaven. She is leaning over the balcony railing in the sky. Her hair is hanging over the balcony, and hair is a very important element here. We can remember the image of Ophelia depicted in the paintings of that time – a woman with long, red hair, lying in the water, this is Elizabeth Siddall, and she was actually the spouse of Rosetti, the author of the poetry of this cantata. With her long hair draped over the balcony railing, this young woman waits and dreams of the moment when her lover, who is still alive and on earth, will finally die and join her in heaven. She fantasizes about what will happen, she will finally be able to marry him, they will be blessed and be together forever. It is Paradise, but it is full of longing and waiting.
The music is unbelievably gorgeous. There is a mezzo-soprano solo, a soprano solo, a women’s chorus and an orchestra playing as if the musicians of the heavenly orchestra had gathered in it.
So we begin with the underground depths and then rise up. Then follows – Ligeti’s opus Distant. Is it about distance? How would you describe what happens there?
Distant simply means – far away, in the distance. The score looks very complicated, the music also seems very complicated, the composer gave a lot of instructions to each musician how to play each sound, each note. I told the orchestra players: “Forget modern music, be a theater troupe!” And we operate in a kind of theater. Ligeti himself describes this piece as entering a completely dark room. At first you see absolutely nothing because your eyes are not used to the darkness. And then gradually, as you get used to it, you begin to see shapes, outlines, and distinguish one object from another. You know something from what you see, something you don’t. It’s like a journey of discovery, a bit scary, but also has some really beautiful moments of resonance. Another influence, as mentioned by Ligeti, which refers to Distant – is a poem by John Keats, written in 1819, called “Ode to a Nightingale”. Ligeti was obsessed with this poem, and here is one moment when he talks about a window that opens on the foam of the sea and leads to the far reaches of imagination. I told the orchestra about it, because I, who
I’ve sung a lot of modern music my whole life, I’ve avoided dueling or sharing the analytical or intellectual aspects of music. Of course, this is important to me when studying a piece and preparing for its staging and performance, but then I have to remember that this music was composed by a person, a human being, and we have to pay attention to the emotional and even dramatic side of music.
What is special about Ligeti’s compositions for you?
The technique used by Ligeti in this composition is what he himself called harmonic crystallization. You can’t feel it, but if you’ve seen videos of crystals slowly, slowly, slowly forming until they become large and complex structures, that’s how Ligeti works with this music. He also uses simple techniques in this composition, such as canons, he creates a fantastic, miraculous structure from sounds. It’s like a sound sculpture, this piece.
And finally – Olivier Messiaen’s meditation suite “The Ascension.” How do you understand this piece?
Messiaen’s “Ascension” is a four-part opus. And I can definitely say that the first part is very contemplative. In it, the composer has highlighted trumpets and French horns, as well as other brass and woodwind instruments. It is something like a meditative fanfare. The first part has both peace and triumph. As we know, Messian was a very religious man, but his relationship with the spiritual world, with God, was very personal. They were not dogmatic, they were personal. The second part of the suite is something like unison singing. It’s like a refrain that everyone plays together. As a leitmotif, a very Wagnerian leitmotif. When everyone sings together, at the same time. And this part also has a very beautiful, meditative English horn solo. Also with flute, clarinet and oboe. The third part of the suite is praise to heaven. Here you can imagine these Renaissance paintings with angels dancing with tambourines, beating drums, it’s like an expression of ecstasy in European culture, which is associated with dervishes. It is the ecstasy of entering the spiritual world, something beyond the prayers that follow. But the 4th part is played only by strings.
And it is an extraordinary part – divine, with an endless melody, incredibly beautiful, sublime, calm, noble, something that the soul longs for.
So also – work about longing…
Yes, for longing. About leaving your physical body and traveling towards something divine. And this cannot be achieved only by passing through death, it can simply happen when we move into another dimension, as it were, either through music or sports or falling in love. It is the joy that takes our breath away in this incredibly beautiful piece, an early work of his, one of his first orchestral works.
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2023-10-26 17:40:58
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