Barbara Hannigan: A very modern artist

Hannigan strides through the Old Green Room — a grand gallery that is all that’s left of the pre-1994 theatre, behind the box office and bar — as the final leg of her 45-minute walk from her flat in Lewes. She’s slim, fit, athletic, suggesting a fashion model or movie star rather than an opera singer, but it soon becomes clear that she isn’t any ordinary opera singer.

For a start, she has made her name in demanding 20th-century roles such as the fiendish high soprano of the police chief Gepopo in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre; the lead in George Benjamin’s international success Written on Skin; and iconic “repertory” parts like Berg’s Lulu and the hardly less difficult Marie in Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (The Soldiers), a work that requires vast forces.

Hannigan has been to Glyndebourne once before, as a member of the public, more than 20 years ago. “Yes, in 1994. I happened to be in London and came down here to see Birtwistle’s The Second Mrs Kong. I was just visiting a friend, but now I’m here and staying in Lewes, and I can make the walk over the fields. I don’t have to take the bus every day — it’s 45 minutes when I walk quickly. I was thinking I should run it, but I remembered the score. Once I’ve memorised that, I’ll run it.”

Her interest in modern and new music goes back to her student days. She sang her first new piece at the age of 17 — she was born in 1971 — and to date, she tells me, she has sung in 85 world premieres, concert works and operas, an astonishing record for a vocalist in her prime.

She comes from rural Nova Scotia, but had the luck to go to schools where music was a main subject. “I was always working at composing, even before I started commissioning pieces,” she recalls. “It was just part of my DNA. I played piano and oboe — and I went to one of those high schools where I studied a bit of composition —but I already knew I would sing.

“Then, just by the nature of the engagements I had, and the training — the quite physical training — I was often working with dancers, sometimes with vocal improv and physical improv. I just think it’s in my nature to be quite risky. Vocally, movement-wise, I don’t like to be still.”

As a singer, Hannigan has avoided the conventional route, and it is surely significant that she comes to Glyndebourne as an established star of new opera, rather than as a young singer at the outset of an international career. In fact, she has bypassed most of the obvious young-soprano stepping stones on her way to working with the big names of the concert world — Pierre Boulez, Simon Rattle and the late composer Henri Dutilleux, whose music she has championed.

When I ask her what “conventional” opera roles she has sung, she mentions first Lulu, then Debussy’s Mélisande, both about as close as she gets to the standard repertoire, though she made her debut as Mozart’s Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute. “I chose early on not to sing standard repertoire. I knew that once I had sung the Queen of the Night, everyone would want me to do it, so I decided immediately I would never do it again.”

In this respect, her career resembles that of a spoken-theatre leading lady, rather than an opera diva, though there are a handful of parts — Lulu and Mélisande especially — that she has already sung in several productions and will continue to explore.

It was a chance meeting at the Melbourne Festival with the composer of Hamlet that brought her to Glyndebourne to sing Ophelia. “I met Brett in Australia in 2007, but I knew some of his music before then from performances in Europe. In a way, I’ve been playing Ophelia since 2013, in Hans Abrahamsen and Paul Griffiths’s song cycle Let Me Tell You. Brett was actually at the premiere of that piece in Berlin, then I was asked to do his work here. With the alignment of Vlad [Jurowski] and Brett, it felt right.”

I ask her to describe the music Dean has written for her. “It’s high, but it’s not crazy, Queen of the Night high. It’s lyrical, which is how I like to sing. I’m not interested in parts like Zerbinetta [the virtuoso soubrette in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos] that sit up there. I like the range of Lulu — which I don’t regard as a coloratura role — and that’s what I said to Brett. I’m certainly not the heaviest Lulu, vocally, and that’s what I like about this Ophelia role. I get to sing in my full range.”

Hannigan clearly relishes her role as the muse not only of composers such as Benjamin and Dean, but of directors, too — including Katie Mitchell, with whom she worked on Mélisande in Aix last summer, as well as on the Benjamin opera there. (Mitchell will direct his new work, Lessons in Love and Violence, at the Royal Opera House next season.) Hannigan also mentions the German Andreas Kriegenburg, who directed her in Munich’s Die Soldaten. They will work together on the premiere of Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen in the Bavarian capital soon.

Yes, a far from conventional opera singer, who also conducts — with a preference for classical repertoire and Stravinsky, rather than new music. But that’s a story for another time. As a vocalist, Hannigan has come a long way since she sang Gabriele in Gerald Barry’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant for English National Opera in 2005. And we haven’t heard the best of her yet.

Hamlet is at Glyndebourne from next Sunday until July 6