As an internationally acclaimed soprano, Barbara Hannigan championed cutting-edge composers from Ligeti to Benjamin. Now she’s pushing new boundaries as a thought-provoking conductor. A series of high-level appointments and groundbreaking performances have catapulted her to the top of her profession, even as she redefines what it is to be a musician.
In 2011, Barbara Hannigan burst onto the conducting scene with a performance of Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre that seemed to put the entire profession on notice. As a soprano working alongside conductors like Simon Rattle and Alan Gilbert, she had already perfected the role of Gepopo, the histrionic secret police chief in the composer’s “anti-anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre (from which the Mysteries are distilled), where she mixed razorsharp coloratura with brat-fatale antics.
Watch Barbara Hannigan's Musical America Awards interview
This time, she teetered onto the stage in dominatrix heels and tossed off a downbeat in the direction of the Avanti Ensemble with an imperious flick of her wrist. For the next 12 minutes, she dispatched the treacherous vocal part while conducting the orchestra with comically high-strung gestures that never broke character. It was a high-wire act that matched Ligeti’s absurdist genius, rendering the piece even more outrageous and jaw-droppingly virtuosic. It felt subversive, too, of the music world’s most entrenched hierarchies.
In an interview Hannigan recalled meeting the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen later that evening. He had been in the hall, marveling at the way she cued entrances for the musicians a split second before the beat, all the while singing in time. How, he wanted to know, did she manage to split her brain in two? “I knew what he meant,” she says. “Because as the singer I had to be in the present, and as the conductor I had to be in the future. It is true: one does need to be slightly ahead.”
Now 53, Hannigan has built a career on being slightly ahead. Raised on choral singing and her father’s Billy Joel and Pavarotti cassettes in Nova Scotia, she established herself early on as a soprano of graceful tone and ferocious curiosity. She championed composers including Boulez, Stockhausen, Zorn, and Sciarrino, and premiered critically acclaimed works such as George Benjamin’s Written on Skin and Hans Abrahamsen’s Let me tell you. With her Ligeti tour-de-force in Paris, she simultaneously tested the limits of what a singer may be and what a conductor may do.
These days, singing engagements make up less than half of her schedule. She is principal guest conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and has been tapped to become chief conductor and artistic director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in 2026. She has formal partnerships with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. While she has added a few carefully chosen roles to the repertoire of works that she both conducts and sings, among them Elle in Poulenc’s La voix humaine and Anne Trulove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, most of her energy is now devoted to “just” conducting. Any time she’s on the podium, however, she draws on her skill as a singer. “It all carries over,” she says. “It’s all related to the breath.”
When Hannigan conducts in character, she doesn’t just have to divide her brain into two different time zones. She also has to develop a vocabulary of movements that are both dramatically coherent and functionally sound. In the Ligeti, she policed the ensemble with jerky, angular impatience. As the self-absorbed protagonist of La voix humaine, which she performed with her back to the audience facing a live-to-screen camera, she sometimes led the orchestra with small movements of her torso, her arms wrapped tightly around her. Another time, she shadowboxed a phrase to its explosive conclusion.
Given the creative license that comes with inventing an art form, Hannigan’s movements on the podium are often remarkably economical. A YouTube video of her sing-conducting the cabaletta from The Rake’s Progress has her standing with her back to the orchestra, barely moving her arms. It seems as if she is not so much giving a beat as transmitting the flow of the music with the rise and fall of her lungs.
“I find that the gesture has to be dramaturgical,” she says. Even in an orchestral work such as Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, some representational elements find their way in. In the lulling opening strains, she says, she found her arms forming a cradle. “I don’t think consciously of it,” she says, “it’s just something that goes by in a filmic way almost.”
Having worked with different conductors as a soprano, she learned there was no one way to show motion and meter. “What is clear to one person can be totally undecipherable to another,” she says. “And it has to do with authenticity of gesture in relation to who you are and your connection to the music. And that’s what the orchestra responds to. They respond to the authenticity of the person.”
Though she took formal conducting lessons with the legendary Jorma Panula in Finland and coaching sessions with Simon Rattle and David Zinman, she says that the best advice came from Rattle during a call she made from halfway into a rehearsal with a new orchestra when she felt her confidence draining. “He asked, ‘Are you doing things right or are you doing the right thing?’” she recalls. “Then he said, ‘Think about how you feel when you sing Lulu,’ knowing that it is the role I connected to so completely that every single cell of my body was in the right place with that character. And he said, ‘Be Lulu on the podium.’ Not be that character, but be Barbara in that skin.”
Drawing attention to the body can be a risky act for women conductors, who are under different levels of scrutiny from their male colleagues. “Marin Alsop, for whom I have immense respect, talks about gestures which a man can do and which a woman can’t,” Hannigan says. “But I can’t think about what I can or cannot do because of my gender or because of my experience. I must do what will get the result that I need, that I imagined.”
Besides, she says, her work on the podium, which she describes as managing “omni-directional power,” is not about drawing the listener’s eye. “The function of the conductor is also dramaturgical for the audience,” she says. “It’s helping the audience to hear, to know what to listen for.” •
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim is a writer and the founder of the deep-listening concert series “Beginner’s Ear.” A longtime contributing music critic for The New York Times, her work garnered honors including the 2021 Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Criticism. You can subscribe to her newsletter at beginnersear.com.
