Barbara Hannigan

The soprano Barbara Hannigan, who was born in 1971 in Waverley, Canada, studied voice with Mary Morrison at the University of Toronto and with Meinard Kraak at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. She quickly won international recognition as an interpreter of contemporary music. Hannigan has performed more than 85 world premieres to date, collaborating with such composers as Pierre Boulez, Sir George Benjamin, Gerald Barry, Salvatore Sciarrino, Pascal Dusapin, Hans Abrahamsen, and Brett Dean. Along with her vocal dexterity, she is celebrated for her dramatic presence on the opera stage. Highlights of recent years include Toshio Hosokawa’s Matsukaze and Alban Berg’s Lulu in Brussels, George Benjamin’s Written on Skin and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in Aix-en-Provence, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten in Munich, and Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence at the Royal Opera House in London. In the 2019-20 season, she will appear in the world premiere of Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen. In the concert hall, Hannigan also regularly performs with Sir Simon Rattle and with such conductors as Kent Nagano, Andris Nelsons, Vladimir Jurowski, Reinbert de Leeuw, Antonio Pappano, and Kirill Petrenko. Hannigan has herself been active as a conductor since 2011, often in connection with her singing engagements. She has led concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the London and Toronto Symphony Orchestras, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Gothenburg Symphony, which has named her First Guest Conductor starting in the new season. With Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, she conducted her first opera in the spring of 2019 as part of her mentoring program “Equilibrium.” This summer she served as artist-in-
residence at the Aldeburgh Festival and directed the Ojai Festival in California. Barbara Hannigan will receive the Léonie Sonning Music Prize in 2020.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 24 August 2008 as part of the Pollini Project with works by Luigi Nono.

August 2019