Barbara Hannigan’s decision to combine singing with conducting has sometimes produced uneven results when she chose to undertake both simultaneously. For her latest London Symphony Orchestra concert however, she handed the vocal honours over to Greek soprano Aphrodite Patoulidou for Claude Vivier’s Lonely Child, the final work in an uncompromising programme about grief, mourning and lives lost before their time.
Vivier was murdered, a victim of homophobic hate crime, in 1983, at the age of 34, and Lonely Child, to his own text, examines the consolatory role of fantasy in an unhappy childhood spent first in an orphanage, and later with abusive adoptive parents. It’s a work of astonishing beauty and fragility as well as desperate sadness, in which the vocal line swerves between declamation and ululation over shifting orchestral textures, as tuned eastern percussion and sudden drum strokes alternately beguile and threaten. Patoulidou, her voice a mixture of silk and steel, was utterly mesmerising despite moments of occluded diction. And every note of Vivier’s exquisite instrumentation spoke volumes thanks to the refined intensity of Hannigan’s conducting.
Berg’s Violin Concerto, triggered by the death, from polio of Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and her second husband Walter Gropius, formed a logical companion piece in some respects. Veronika Eberle was the lyrical, sweet-toned soloist in a performance strong on beauty, but occasionally lacking dramatic fire. Eberle’s sorrowing way with the cadenza was gripping, and she sounded ravishing in the final pages, but Hannigan’s painstaking, detailed way with the score sometimes came at the expense of emotional immediacy.
No such problems, however, marred the striking directness of her interpretation of Haydn’s Symphony No 44 in E Minor, Trauer (“Mourning”, so called because Haydn requested the Adagio be played at his funeral), where tension and austerity combined in the playing to edgy, riveting effect. And Berio’s arrangement of Bach’s Contrapunctus XIX, the final, incomplete movement of The Art of Fugue, made a sombre prelude to the entire evening, its dignity undermined by an unnerving close, when Bach breaks off composition and Berio fills the resulting silence with the eeriest of discords.
