Hannigan/Chamayo Review – Strange and Beautiful Musical Magic | classical music

HeyThe “unperformable” of a new generation is the staple of another generation’s repertoire. Tristan und Isolde, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s Ninth, were all declared out of reach. But when Barbara Hannigan—the bold, seemingly limitless soprano with more than 100 world premieres to her name—admits that the work is close, reducing her to a “state of panic” over the course of a multi-year study, you believe her.

Inspired by the Finnish national epic Kalevala, John Zorn’s Jumalattaret is less a lyric cycle than a concert session, summoning a series of spirits and goddesses into sound. The singer shifts from character to character in shrill shrieks and shrieks, guttural moans and shrieks, sometimes pinned, sometimes delivered by the piano (here Bertrand Chamayo) – a charming assistant ever present.

On the page it sounds like something new, a circus show of high-profile soloists, but in Hannigan’s delivery it was a strange musical magic: lyrical, primal, ravishingly beautiful. Zorn’s 2012 score brings together vast swaths of musical history—folk songs and rock grooves, minimalist vocals and jazz—before breaking them down into shimmering sonic fragments. The close intrigue between Chamayo’s percussive piano and Hannigan’s freewheeling vocals made for an exhilarating listen. I marveled at the sounds rather than the feats, even if the latter were formidable.

What do you program besides this kind of musical uniqueness? Messiaen’s 1938 Chants de Terre et de Ciel—the second of the composer’s three large-scale works for voice and piano—shares Zorn’s spiritual ecstasy, answering her eternal femininity to the strict masculine God of Catholicism. It is home to both Chamayo, whose piano seems to speak French vowels, and Hannigan, who caresses Messiaen’s texts with an almost indecent intimacy, rolling them in her mouth, letting them move across her gently swaying body.

Together they took the audience into confidence (who else could sell this repertoire on a Saturday night, or keep them so drawn?) and revealed the intimacy rather than the musical extremes of the cycle celebrating the birth of the composer’s son. Hannigan’s uncanny ability to reinvent not only her voice but also her physicality continued here – now the playful, chatty innocence of Danse du Bébé-Pilule, now the infinitely tenderness of the love ballad Bail avec Mi. The long silence after the thundering finale of “Resurrection” said more than the rapturous applause that followed. Applause for the performance. This was more of a confession.