One generation’s “unperformable” is another’s repertoire staple. Tristan und Isolde, Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s Ninth were all once declared beyond reach. But when Barbara Hannigan – the fearless, seemingly limitless soprano with more than 100 world premieres to her name – admits that a work came close, reducing her to “a state of panic” over a multi-year study period, you believe her.
Inspired by Finland’s national epic the Kalevala, John Zorn’s Jumalattaret is less a song-cycle than a musical seance, summoning a series of spirits and goddesses in sound. The singer morphs from persona to persona in yelps and keening cries, guttural moans and shouts, sometimes anchored, sometimes released by the piano (here Bertrand Chamayou) – an ever-present sorcerer’s assistant.
On the page it sounds like a novelty, a circus-act for high-wire soloists, but in Hannigan’s delivery it was strange musical magic: lyrical, primal, ravishingly beautiful. Zorn’s 2012 score gathers up armfuls of musical history – folksongs and rock grooves, plainchant and jazz’s scat singing – before shattering them into glittering sonic fragments. The close conspiracy between Chamayou’s percussive piano and Hannigan’s freewheeling vocals made for exhilarating listening; you marvelled at sounds not feats, even if the latter were monumental.
What do you programme alongside this kind of musical singularity? Messiaen’s 1938 Chants de Terre et de Ciel – the second of only three large-scale works by the composer for voice and piano – shares the spiritual ecstasy of the Zorn, answering its eternal feminine with the sternly masculine God of Catholicism. It’s home-territory for both Chamayou, whose piano seems to speak with French vowels, and Hannigan, who caressed Messiaen’s texts with almost indecent intimacy, rolling them around in her mouth, letting them move through her gently swaying body.
Together they took the capacity crowd (who else could sell out this repertoire on a Saturday night, or hold them so rapt?) into their confidence, exposing the intimacy rather than the musical extremity of a cycle that celebrates the birth of the composer’s son. Hannigan’s uncanny ability to reinvent not just her sound but her physicality persisted here – now playful, chattering innocence for Danse du Bébé-Pilule, now infinitely tender in love-song Bail avec Mi. The long silence after the pealing finale Résurrection said more than the standing ovation that followed. Applause is for a performance; this was something closer to a confession.
