Everyone keeps talking about classical music’s image problem, and 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 to the problem of what classical music might represent in our increasingly fragmented culture is not to go into denial but to dive deeper, forever deeper, inside music. Hannigan has anchored her reputation around high-wire modernism. When a conspicuously frail Pierre Boulez came to London’s South Bank in 2011 for a final lap of honour, Hannigan sang Pli selon pli, his labyrinthine, tangled 60-minute long setting of Mallarmé.
On the opera stage, the characters she portrays have a tendency to plummet towards emotional collapse.
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