“Everyone keeps talking about classical music’s image problem,” writes Philip Clark in the April 25 issue of Spectator magazine (U.K.).”Proposals on the table designed to rescue the music from apparent extinction have included the suggestion that conductors ought to face audiences rather than orchestras, and the cunning plan, mooted by Julian Lloyd Webber, that we stop calling it ‘classical music.’ But what classical music really needs right now are more performers like Barbara Hannigan, whose embrace of music is absolute; whose solution … is to dive deeper, forever deeper, inside music.… Conducting is absolutely not something she does as a sideshow to her singing. During the next 12 months, she will conduct Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin and the Suite from Lulu; and for the future, she is preparing Mahler’s Fourth Symphony—where she will turn towards the audience to sing the last movement, having conducted the first three. ‘People can, and have, tied themselves up in knots trying to define what it is I do…. I say I’m “a musician”—both sides of my musical life have come together.’ ” Hannigan tours with the Britten Sinfonia in May; she has conducted at the Châtelet in Paris, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
Posted April 23, 2015
