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Let me tell you - The Open College of the Arts

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Let me tell you

While “spellbinding”, “astonishing” and “glorious” are not words common in reviews of 21st century classical music, Hans Abrahamson’s Let Me Tell You – which has garnered a slew of ecstatic praise since its premiere in 2013 – has commanded them all. Despite over twenty performances across Europe – a fairly big deal for a new piece of concert music – the work only arrived in the UK in August of 2016, when it was performed at the Proms by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of its new chief conductor, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla.

Abrahamsen – let me tell you from Göteborgs Symfoniker on Vimeo.
Written for Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan and the Berlin Philharmonic, the work is a seven-movement song cycle setting words by the musicologist Paul Griffiths. The text is written from the point of view of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, following her transformation, ambiguous “madness” and eventual death. The soundworld is bleak in some ways, life-affirming in others, and Hannigan’s pitch-perfect delivery treads a finely balanced path through its strange, magical landscape.
Barbara Hannigan is one of the best known contemporary music sopranos active today. She has taken on some of the most fearsome roles in modern opera, including Berg’s Lulu, Zimmerman’s Marie, and the chief of the secret police in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, all to wide critical acclaim, and has recently taken up the baton as a conductor as well. I was lucky enough to meet Hannigan at IRCAM, the Parisian contemporary music hub founded by Pierre Boulez, and I was struck by her lack of egoism, her encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary vocal music and her genuine interest in the work of the student composers at the composition academy I was attending. She brings her A-game to every role she approaches, and Let Me Tell You is no exception. The work is a genuinely collaborative achievement: Hannigan’s impossibly virtuosic delivery of the text – which is remarkably intelligible – contributes as much of the identity of the piece as the notes themselves.

Hans Abrahamson is, along with Per Nørgård, one of the few living Danish composers to have achieved wide international recognition. He is well known for the purity and apparent simplicity of his music, but the smooth elegance of the surface belies sophisticated, layered structures and a musical language which can rise to heights of intense expressivity, a quality which Let Me Tell You demonstrates to tremendous effect.
Let Me Tell You is a wintery work: snow, ice, cold winds and frozen vistas are exposed in slow, delicately unwinding passages, which blossom unexpectedly into moments of intense lyricism and flashes of vivid colour. Winter is an ongoing occupation for Abrahamson, his 2008 chamber work Schnee, written for nine instrumentalists and lasting just under an hour, is a delicate, exquisitely sensitive meditation on snow. Schnee is built from very carefully designed sets of canons – instruments playing the same material at different speeds, registers and delays – think Frere Jacques but built from snowflakes. Drawing influences from Bach, Mozart, Tai-Chi and the songs of children, it sounds like no other music being written today.

Let Me Tell You inhabits a similar space to that of Schnee, but while Schnee is intimate and introspective music, Let Me Tell You is built on a grander scale, not snowflakes but snowdrifts, and it is undeniably epic. For the most part, the work inhabits a blurred, transparent space: colours and chords melt into each other, while Hannigan’s voice slides over the surface, sometimes languid, sometimes desolate. Every now and again, however, moments of extraordinarily powerful intensity emerge out of the mist: In the sixth movement there is an outburst like a sudden flurry of electrically charged snow which cascades uncontrollably through the orchestra and every time I hear it, even now I know it is coming, my breath is taken away.
In Let Me Tell You – as in Schnee – Abrahamson draws on older music for inspiration, this time the expressively repeated pulsation on one note that can be found in Monteverdi and Italian Baroque Opera known as ‘trillo’ (the trill as we know it today was called ‘gruppo’). This technique opens the work, on the words “Let me tell you how it was…”. This allows the voice to retain a syllabic speech pattern even while it is stretched into a windingly long melodic line. In the second movement this same technique is used to build up rhythmic energy, shortening rather than lengthening the pace of the syllables, culminating in a series of brilliant top-note stabs from both the orchestra and the voice. This elegant use of musical resources is part of what makes Let Me Tell You such a masterpiece – each individual passage is constructed with great care and precision, but it all adds up to give the whole multi-movement work a strikingly distinctive musical identity. One gets the sense that this is a piece which is almost unaware of musical fashion – it makes use of microtonality, nested tuplets and a host of other contemporary music staples, but manages to sound strangely timeless. This is music that Mahler, maybe even Monteverdi, would have understood, but at the same time is utterly uncompromising in its modernity.
The classical music of the last few decades has a reputation for being either dry, academic, male-dominated navel-gazing or flippant, frivolous tat. Let Me Tell You is as about as far as it could conceivably be from either of these stereotypes – it is rare to find a piece so serious and sincere in its intent which manages to be so transformatively, ravishingly beautiful. I have no doubt this work will be regarded as a masterpiece of the early twenty-first century, and it confirms both Abrahamson and Hannigan as artists of the very highest order.
Further Resources:
Schnee from the point of view of a conductor:
https://musicofourepoch.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/discovering-recent-masterworks-abrahamsens-schnee/
Hannigan on Singing and Conducting:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/11/barbara-hannigan-conducting-britten-sinfonia
Abrahamson, Hannigan, Griffiths Panel Discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pxus-4sGo
Image Credit: Abrahamson Photo Credit: Lars Skaaning


Posted by author: Desmond Clarke

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