Barbara Hannigan: The 2025/26 Season

Associate Artist Barbara Hannigan guides us through her concerts for our new season, featuring literary-inspired works by Richard Strauss, György Ligeti and a world premiere from Laura Bowler.

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I’m very excited to see how this programme will affect all of us – the musicians, me and the audience – because it is coming from a far away and very spiritual place.

I chose all three pieces on this programme knowing that we were going to be giving the world premiere of Laura Bowler’s work for voice and orchestra, based on a book by Han Kang called The White Book. It has to do with all white things in a way. It’s kind of a list, but it also has to do with grief: a very spiritual way of looking at grief as something pure. I wanted to choose two other works that I felt would compliment Laura Bowler’s piece, and one that I’ve really wanted to do for a long time is Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. Of course, many people know the opening of this piece because it was used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But for me, I’m interested in it because I’ve always been fascinated by comparative religions, as was the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in Zoroastrianism which this piece is exploring and touching on.

Ligeti’s Lontano is a very beloved and precious work to me. Ligeti said of the piece that he imagined a phrase from a well-known Keats poem, looking out the porthole of a ship onto unknown lands. So imagining that one is so far away from this magical place on the horizon. I think the programme has quite a touching, emotional feeling.

Laura asked if I would be interested in collaborating on a work that she would write for me. She was very interested to find a way to set some passages from The White Book and managed to get the rights to do so. When talking about my voice, she of course is aware of the way that I perform, the range of my voice, the possibility of my presence in concert pieces and how it’s never just a stand and sing kind of piece.

I’m very excited to see what she will offer. There are still a lot of unknowns, which I love. And the other aspect about this piece is that I didn’t want it to be singing and conducting, because that adds another story to a piece. If you have the idea that the singer is conducting, then that has to have some necessity in the narrative, and we didn’t want to force that. So we decided that we would invite a younger colleague of mine who I had mentored in the past, conductor Bar Avni, and I’m very happy to share the podium with her.

The most rewarding part of working with Bar is the development of our relationship, because she first approached me and asked if she could watch a rehearsal that I was doing in Rome, which is how we met. And because she made that effort to come and to introduce herself to me, I thought I could enjoy spending a week having her as my assistant, so I asked her to assist me in Sweden with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. I was actually sick when I arrived and wasn’t going to be able to do the whole first day of rehearsals. So I said, ‘I trust her, let’s put her on the podium.’

At the end of the day, the orchestra called me and they said she was fabulous. And so I consulted with the concert master, the players committee and the manager of the orchestra with the idea that we would give her one of the pieces on that programme, which was a Rossini Overture. It was less than two weeks later that she was heading into an international conducting competition – which she won. I like to think that this experience with Gothenburg really helped buoy her spirits and confidence to bring her towards that success in the competition!

Mentoring plays an important part in my life. As a young artist, I was never shy to ask for advice from older, more experienced artists, and I really thought the worst they can do is say no! To this day I really cherish the generosity of my colleagues, and they don’t even necessarily have to be older than me – they might know something that they can help me with. So about eight years ago I created a foundation called Equilibrium, in which I and other artists would mentor younger colleagues (be they singers, conductors, instrumentalists or even composers). It’s become a very natural part of my life and every engagement that I do as a conductor, I always have a young conductor with me assisting.

I love to bring on young singers and young instrumentalists who are at the beginning of their professional career. In many cases I’m looking at the alumni of Equilibrium and seeing the successes that they’re having. It’s really exciting to watch their careers and have been some small part of their path.

I think any good piece stays fresh and is worth listening to over and over again. With every piece, I come from the score and I usually do quite a bit of background research. Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra comes from Nietzsche’s fascination with Zoroastrianism – which is a Persian religion, thousands of years before Christianity. It was possibly the first religion in which there was a kind of equality among humans and a benevolence, so I’ll be doing a lot of extra research on that. Since I was in university I have studied comparative religions, it’s always been my thing. And then of course there’s the score, and how Strauss was inspired by what Nietzsche wrote and how he put that onto paper. I think it is very exciting work, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.