It takes a certain something to sing a visceral 36-minute monodrama and then conduct a double bill of Ligeti and Richard Strauss, but LSO associate artist Barbara Hannigan is no ordinary musician. That each made an indelible impression is a testament to her exceptional talent and versatility.
Laura Bowler’s The White Book sets five chapters for voice, orchestra and live electronics from Han Kang’s autobiographical meditation of the same name. Kang’s texts are reflections on the colour white, inspired by the death of her sister who lived for just a few hours after a premature birth. The music seems to exist on the borderland between life and death, floating somewhere between earth, sea and sky. Vast chords roll like waves, only to trail off in a delicate spray of percussion. Misty strings hang in the air like a cloud of breath on a winter’s day or motes of dust in a shaft of sunlight.
Hannigan, swathed in spectral silk, lived and breathed the music, her gently amplified soprano rising and falling. At times her voice hovered in the empyrean, seemingly forever. At others, she hurled phrases into the void where Matthew Fairclough’s electronics caught and multiplied them, their fragments whirling in the air like a murmuration of starlings. As conductor Bar Avni drew the music to a close in a shimmer of strings, you could have heard a pin drop.
On the podium, Hannigan employs a similarly elastic physicality to sculpt a score with remarkable fluidity. Ligeti’s Lontano, a study in glacial microtonality, has seldom sounded so sensual. She brought a similar erotic charge to Also sprach Zarathustra. It’s a work that can feel episodic, but not here. The occasional balance issue aside, Hannigan had its measure, from the mighty opening sunrise to its hushed final bars.
Unafraid to take her time, she homed in on the music’s yearning intensity, coaxing the LSO to ever greater heights of passion. Double basses delivered a bone chilling Grave Song; the fugal Of Science and Learning was pedantically ponderous. A lavishly swung Dance Song, oozing Viennese whipped cream, rendered Strauss’s unstable closing harmonies all the more disquieting.
