Fasten your chastity belts, culture vultures, the Shakespeare 400th is upon us. That would be the death anniversary of the greatest playwright and poet in English. (This remains undisputed.) D-Day is April 23 (the same, memorably, as his birthday in 1564), but how long can it be until the fur starts flying over the perennial question, Was Will Gay? Meanwhile, enterprising concert organizations are mining the rich vein of Shakespeare in music, which almost helpfully limits the perspective on this all-encompassing presence.
If nothing greater than Hans Abrahamsen's let me tell you comes of the Shakespeare Year on the musical front, it will be enough. To say what it is �" "solo cantata for soprano and orchestra sound off by one can-taty" �" it's easiest to say that its nearest antecedent is Benjamin Britten's Phaedra , composed for (and with) Janet Baker, to a story set free from the constraints of narrative yielding both a great, sustained, ecstatic outburst of sound and, not incidentally, one of the greatest vocal recordings of all time.
Danish composer Abrahamsen's work, given its premiere by the Berlin Philharmonic under Andris Nelsons in December 2013, was written for, and with the high participation of, soprano Barbara Hannigan, one of the keenest musicians among us, and a soprano whose stratospheric range calls her to artistic heights. This is the woman who sang the title role in a staged performance of Berg's Lulu in which the focus was on Lulu the dancer, performing some of the character's most torturously difficult music in a tutu and en pointe . Her.
Hannigan commissioned the piece from Abrahamsen before he had written any other vocal music, and her part of the compositional process was letting him know what the voice �" hers, anyway �" could do, including a four-hour "singing lesson" of music from the Renaissance to 12-tone. (Lest this seem self-serving, "occasioning" a piece only she could sing, I can think of a number of other sopranos, and Lulus, who, if they are wise, and they are, are letting this score trash their lives at this moment.) The text, by critic, contemporary music commentator and author Paul Griffiths, is distilled from his 2008 novel, which was written using only the 481 words Shakespeare gives Ophelia in Hamlet. Here they are hammered into seven insinuatingly potent poems, the second of which is called "O but memory is not one but many." Words and music have rarely met so transfixingly since Shakespeare.
The playwright's Ophelia famously gets less direct, unambiguous interest from Hamlet than your average "love interest," and she's tragic leaning toward pathetic, in the nicest sense of the word, and drowns. The creature who sings let me tell you (actually her first words) both is and, mostly, isn't Ophelia, and if she isn't the desperate recessive creature Shakespeare made her, she's strong largely in the indelible memory her haunting music leaves. She's a sister of Lulu, and Debussy's Melisande and Wagner's Kundry, who comes from a place outside of time as we think of it and fills space like a galaxy of stars of varying intensities.
Tellingly, the first of the "extended" vocal techniques employed goes back, if not quite to the Elizabethan, then to the dawn of opera: the so-called Monteverdi trill, the ululating repetition of a single pitch. But everything about the ravishing, exalted vocal line is extended, and it cascades over the listener in the same way it showers over the magical music for instruments, featuring celeste and other naturally high-pitched instruments taken to the limits of what they can do. If delicacy can rightly be said to be extreme, it is here.
No one, least of all Hannigan, would call this easy music. But it goes down on first hearing, and audiences have consistently greeted the end of its half-hour of otherworldliness with prolonged silence. To my knowledge, only Hannigan has sung it so far, but she has, since the premiere �" and against all odds for such a taxing orchestral score �" "toured" it with nearly a dozen orchestras, Nelsons' Boston Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Moest among them. A new recording (Winter and Winter CD) of it alone is taken from live performances at the beginning of last July, with Munich's Bavaria Radio Symphony Orchestra under Nelsons. It's all you need. That said, the broadcast from Boston just weeks ago shows that these astonishing musicians continue to go deeper and deeper with this unfathomable, transporting music.
If it's news to you that Hannigan also conducts, sometimes while also singing, go directly to the Barbara Hannigan Concert Documentary (Accentus), a DVD of her concert conducting and singing with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the Lucerne Festival in August 2014, plus a wholly absorbing documentary about this singular musician. A lot of the attention has gone to the fact that she appeared in latex to sing the "Mysteries of the Macabre" by Gyorgy Ligeti, but really, the entire concert �" which begins with Mozart concert arias �" and documentary are pretty jaw-dropping.