It’s the morning after the night before when I meet Canadian soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan and British composer and vocalist Laura Bowler. We’re in Gothenburg, backstage at the Swedish city’s sleek Konserthus. The previous evening, Hannigan sang the world premiere of Bowler’s new work, The White Book, with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Neither has slept well. Hannigan stayed up eating cheese brought from home in France and talking with her assistant conductor. Bowler was “so wired” she was awake until 2am.
Both seem shellshocked. They are also keen to compare notes, which is why portions of our conversation feel less like an interview and more like an adrenaline-fuelled debrief. And not just a debrief, either. In high-energy asides, they discuss the importance of travelling with your own tea (Yorkshire for Hannigan, Clipper for Bowler), where to buy the best buns in Gothenburg (Eva’s Paley, Hannigan advises), volcanoes (Bowler is obsessed) and what “big conductors” earn – too much, reckons Hannigan. They should be paying their assistants to attend rehearsals from their own fees, like she does. “Tithe! Tithe!” she concludes with a flourish.
In song, in opera and on the podium, Hannigan exudes authority. Offstage, she is also a force to be reckoned with. The fact that she, Bowler and I are meeting simultaneously is a last-minute change made at Hannigan’s request earlier that morning. Bowler and I have already chatted at a nearby cafe so arrive together. Before entering Hannigan’s dressing room, we remove our shoes, “because of the dress”.
The garment looms over us as we talk, pouring wraith-like down the front of a wardrobe. Hannigan wore it onstage for the premiere and it will also feature in The White Book’s debuts in London (with the London Symphony Orchestra) and Copenhagen (with the Copenhagen Philharmonic). It’s an exceptionally delicate one-of-a-kind confection of white silk and wool linen created by Japanese fashion designer Yuima Nakazato, its reams of fabric held together by a system of tiny magnets. Hannigan needed a video tutorial to be shown how it worked. Bowler marvels about its “wonderful balance between strength and fragility, which felt perfect for the piece”.
Her score sets five short chapters from the Booker- and Nobel prize-winning author Han Kang’s The White Book, an “autobiographical meditation” on the death of the narrator’s baby sister. It begins with a litany of white objects – “Blank paper/ White dog/ White hair/ Shroud” – and ends with a quasi-ecstatic saturation of whiteness. In between, the spare, virtually soundless narrative is scattered with blank pages and empty space.
Bowler first read Kang’s text at the Christie hospital in Manchester, where her mother was being treated for acute myeloid leukaemia. She read the book again and again at her mother’s bedside. “A lot of the time she was very, very poorly and couldn’t speak or was just asleep. And there was something about the way Han Kang painted these images – it just captured the moment for me.”
Bowler got in touch with Kang and her translator to request permission to set portions of the text and made plans for a new work. Then her situation changed radically. “After my mum had recovered from leukaemia in September 2022,” she explains carefully, “she died in an accident in November.” It’s a startling revelation but Bowler stays focused. “So I reached out to Han Kang again. It’s a very vulnerable, deeply personal text that she’s written and it felt very important for me to be completely transparent about why this meant a lot to me.”
The extracts Bowler chose “capture the balance between life and death – the ache of longing and also the ache of life and the ache of what death is. But also the kind of preservation in life, in your memory and in the environment around you, even when someone is no longer here.” That tension between presence and absence runs through Bowler’s score, haunting the repetitions and oscillations of its high-wire vocal line and her deeply expressive use of cliff-edge dynamic contrasts and eerie electronics. As in so much of Bowler’s music, there are intricate orchestral details, but there is also a breathtaking sense of space.
Bowler hoped from the start to compose the piece specifically for Hannigan. “I’ve listened to Barbara forever,” she confides. “She really is my favourite artist. It’s partly because of her musicianship, but it’s also because of her ability to inhabit work.”
The White Book is no exception. Hannigan’s intense engagement is unmissable during the premiere and as we chat. She springs up to demonstrate a crucial interval at the piano and describes in technical terms exactly how she created the switch of tone colour a particular phrase demanded. “It’s like turning your soul inside out,” she assures me. She mustn’t just “perform” Bowler’s piece, she stresses. “It’s a ritual.”
Yet Hannigan also announces: “I don’t think I’ve ever been more calm for a world premiere in my life.” Coming from someone who has premiered around 100 works, this is quite the statement. Especially given that Bowler’s score demands what she calls “all the stuff that I’ve been able to manage in the last 10 years, which I couldn’t have done earlier in my career”. From the first orchestra rehearsal, Hannigan insists, “I was just super-calm. Because what Laura wrote for me fitted like a glove.”
The two were introduced by opera director Katie Mitchell, at Bowler’s request. “Katie has never introduced me to anyone else except you,” says Hannigan. Bowler is taken aback. “Whoever else might have asked, she’s never made any other matches.” Even at the commissioning stage, however, Hannigan had listened to only 30 seconds of Bowler’s music. “I don’t like to assume anything about a composer writing anything like they wrote before,” she explains. “It was simply an instinct feeling.”
It wasn’t Hannigan’s only instinct about The White Book. Once the three orchestras were in place for the commission, she knew this was not “a sing/conduct piece. It was clearly a sing piece.” Such designations are vital distinctions for one of classical music’s most dynamic multi-taskers and a rare instance of a conductor who simultaneously takes on the solo vocal role in certain works. Instead, Hannigan brought in her mentee Bar Avni to conduct The White Book in all three cities, while Hannigan leads the works after the interval. “It must be hard for someone who I mentored,” she admits. “I kept reassuring her: when I’m bossy in rehearsal, it’s not because I mentored you. It’s because I’m bossy with everybody.”
In August 2026, Hannigan becomes the chief conductor and artistic director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, alongside her current positions with the Gothenburg Symphony, the LSO and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. She quickly corrects my assumption that must mean she is singing less. “I’m also singing a ton. Actually, I’m singing more now than I was five years ago. My voice feels better now. I know my instrument so well, and I know how to handle it and how to pace it. I wish more singers would sing longer.”
Right – but how does she fit everything in? “I have to surrender to the things I can do and the things I cannot change. I know I need a certain amount of sleep. I also know adrenaline is the strongest drug. Do I feel 100% prepared for everything? No, but I don’t think any musician or conductor ever does.”
Bowler herself often performs her own works but was an audience member for The White Book. “I found it quite overwhelming,” she smiles, “but in a really beautiful way. When you’re performing, you have the adrenaline rush filtered out through the performance. But when you’re sat there in the audience, it just stays.”
Was writing the piece cathartic for Bowler, as she grieved? “It’s brought me an element of peace that my mum would have just loved it. She came to everything and was unbelievably supportive. Since she passed, I’ve found it very difficult to find joy when my pieces have premiered. But there’s something about this piece – it feels like she’s there.”
• The UK premiere of The White Book is at the Barbican, London, on 4 March for the LSO’s Half Six Fix; the following day, it forms part of an expanded concert conducted by Hannigan.
