Barbara Hannigan & Ludwig Orchestra - La Passione - Financial Times

The spare, exploratory music of Gérard Grisey is a rare bird in standard concert programmes. It is a fair bet that it has never been paired with a Haydn symphony before, but then reaching out in unlikely directions is what Canadian soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan is all about. Her latest disc brings together three wildly varied works under the title La Passione, which she describes loosely as “three perspectives of transfigured nights”. The connections are more tenuous than they might look on the surface, but Hannigan holds the programme together through the force of her own personality.

Grisey died in 1998 at the age of 52. Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil was his last work and with fateful coincidence the texts he chose for this song cycle explore death through the ages from inscriptions on Egyptian sarcophagi to The Epic of Gilgamesh. There is an apocalyptic sense of finality as the images become ever more bleak, until a lullaby gazes out peacefully to the far horizon at the end.

Hannigan has been singing the work for 10 years and finds expression in each fragmented phrase. The “spectral” music of Grisey, where sound and harmonics float in the void of a no-man’s-land, is atmospherically captured by the 15 instrumentalists.

The disc opens with Luigi Nono’s Djamila Boupacha, composed in homage to a resistance fighter whose trial during the Franco-Algerian war became a cause célèbre. In between, Hannigan conducts Haydn’s Symphony No. 49, “La Passione”, with the deep-toned instruments of the Ludwig Orchestra. The nickname simply refers to the symphony being performed during Holy Week, but Hannigan gives it an emotional intensity that helps it hold its own in the company of Nono and Grisey.