*La Voix Humaine,* Apr 25 2026

Jere, Dale, and I heard Barbara Hannigan with the New York Philharmonic on consecutive evenings in late April 2026. They heard the concert on Friday April 24, 2026 - - they texted me as they were leaving and said I absolutely had to buy a ticket for the next night. This is what Jere said in his text: “OMG. We just came out of the NY Phil with Barbara Hannigan singing the Poulenc La Voix Humaine. You must get a ticket for tomorrow night. Unbelievable. Run don’t walk. We both thought of you at the end of the performance. This is made for you.” Thankfully I was free so I bought a ticket. I’m so glad I did because it was out of this world. I said to them in a text as I left, “Jesus Christ. Tour de freaking force.” It was one of those unforgettable nights when you feel so lucky to have been there.

Hannigan is a Canadian soprano. I heard her in recital at the Park Avenue Armory back in 2017. I was impressed with her but not exactly wowed. I was drawn to her because she specializes in 20th century and contemporary music. She sang Berg’s Lulu a few times, she created the role of Ophelia in the Brett Dean opera of Hamlet, she’s an adventurous artist.

For the first twenty years of her career she was a singer for hire. Then about ten years ago she started working as a conductor, often conducting and singing at the same time. There’s a long tradition of this for pianists - - Mozart would play a piano concerto and conduct from the keyboard. Bernstein and Previn also did this, they would sit at the piano and play and then stand up and conduct when the piano part was taking a break. I’m not sure I’d heard of a singer doing this. Placido Domingo started conducting back in the 80s and I think someone suggested he sing and conduct a concert. His response was that he wasn’t interested because if something went wrong, he wouldn’t be able to blame the conductor. Har har har.

This was only my second or third time at the newly redone David Geffen Hall and what a treat it is to go there. It’s so much warmer and more welcoming than it used to be, the acoustics were totally rehauled with stellar results, and even if you’re not closer to the stage, it feels like you are.

There was a huge video screen along the back of the stage for the Poulenc. They did something touching after the house lights went down, before the performance began: they put up a slide with a photo and tribute to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who had died earlier that week. This got some applause from the audience, of course.

The concert opened with a piece I hadn’t heard before, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen. He wrote it near the end of his life in 1945, (he died in 1949) in the midst of all of the heartbreak and destruction of WWII. Not a pretty time to be a German. The piece is written for 23 solo strings - - five each of first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, plus three basses.

It was gorgeous, full of Strauss’s idiomatic string writing, loaded with drama. Strauss was the master of what I’ll call the Wrong Turn. He’s cruising along, the harmonies are rolling out in a logical manner and then hold it, where did that A minor chord come from? There was one climactic moment that was a sequence of four or five Wrong Turns. I enjoyed that.

Like I said, I hadn’t heard this piece before and I’m glad that my first experience with it was live because it was such a thrill to WATCH. The players were really going at it and it was interesting to see how Strauss didn’t always use all of them. There were four pretty young women in the back of the violin section - - it felt like they sat there for ten minutes looking at the score with their instruments in their laps. Then they all picked up their instruments and started sawing away.

It’s an unfortunate thing to say about a piece that’s only 25 minutes long but it could have been five minutes shorter. It seemed to wander a bit here and there. Strauss’s wife had a term for this, for when Strauss was less than inspired: “Notenspinnung.” Note-spinning. Whoa lady. Harsh. It was also maybe a little too opulent and intense…? Like a flourless chocolate cake, so rich that you can only have a tiny sliver.

Hannigian was a joy to watch as a conductor. She was articulate and highly expressive. She didn’t use a baton, her hands communicated a lot, and her arms were at once weighted and weightless - - they had the strength of intention but were buoyant and flexible. At one point she used her elbows to subdivide the beat, that was a nice touch.

She had a solid sense of the architecture of the piece and the ebb and flow of the tempo. I loved how she often did a long, slow sweep with her left arm. At one point she leaned very far back - - she was wearing a solid set of high heels so I wasn’t concerned for her safety. OK I brought up her shoes so I’ll tell you what she was wearing: an exquisite, slim black velvet pantsuit. Her long blonde hair was loose and down. I wasn’t aware of her hair until the bows, when she tossed it back after bending at the waist.

They took a few minutes for the other members of the orchestra to come onstage. Hannigan also had to change her outfit - - she wore a sort of dressy black T-shirt and a lightweight pair of black slacks. Her hair was loosely tied into a messy ponytail. I didn’t notice the shoes.

La Voix Humaine is a one-woman opera written by Francis Poulenc in 1958, based on the play by Jean Cocteau. It was the last of his three operas and written for the soprano who played the lead in all there, Denise Duval. It’s the story of a woman home alone, on the phone with her lover. They’re split up and it seems like it’s their last time talking with each other. He’s sending someone over to pick up the letters he had written her.

The play was written in the 20s and uses the technological problems they had with telephones at the time: someone else comes on the line, the call is cut off, she can’t hear the other person, all that sort of thing. We only hear her end of the conversation. She pauses to hear him talk now and then but it’s mostly an endless monologue. It’s an unkind thing to say but you can kind of understand why he would split up with her, she’s a mess. Way too clingy and high strung, it would be exhausting being with this lady even just for lunch, let alone for five years. But Cocteau and Poulenc elevate her in that way that gay men do - - we love to see an elegant woman in her suffering. The opera ends with her wrapping the phone cord around her neck and strangulating herself. Her last words, naturally, are “I love you.”

I don’t know what had prompted this but coincidentally I had done a La Voix Humaine deep dive about a month before the concert, courtesy of the New York Public Library. I watched a television production of the play starring Ingrid Bergman, a filmed live performance of the opera with Felicity Lott (and Graham Johnson at the piano), and an artfully lip-synched film of the opera starring Carole Farley.

This is hard to explain but having Hannigan conduct and sing the piece seemed to amplify the mania of her character. She wasn’t just taking this somewhat ordinary breakup and turning it into a big megillah, she was also conducting a full symphony orchestra! That’s extreme!

The video element was one of the highlights of the performance. The video artist was Clemens Malinowski. He set up a camera on the floor in front of her, another to the left, another to the right. She conducted from memory, a music stand would have gotten in the way. The film was in black and white and was projected onto the huge screen covering the back of the stage. There were yellow subtitles on the bottom of the screen (the opera is in French). The sound designer was Etienne Démoulin - - Hannigan had a tiny microphone maybe clipped to the collar of her blouse. This allowed her to project her voice while facing in any direction and also gave her the flexibility to sing very softly.

The brief overture showed Hannigan conducting in a blurry soft focus. It got a little sharper when she started singing, arguing with the operator and the other person on the line, but only went into truly sharp focus when she was on the phone with her lover. Malinowski made thoughtful choices like this throughout the piece, especially in his use of multiple images - - at one point early in the piece we saw Hannigan in sharp focus in the middle of the screen and also saw a blurry, ghostly image of her seen in profile on the left and a mirror image of that ghost on the right. All three were live, all three were moving in tandem. Fascinating.

My favorite double-image sequence had her left arm straight in the air - - this was shown on the left side of the screen, with the mirror image on the right. Her right hand was in the middle of those two arms, on the bottom of the screen, and it had its own mirror doppelgänger. The arms sort of danced on the sides while the hands made kaleidoscopic figures. It was hypnotic. This video shows excerpts from a performance of the same concert with the Filarmonica della Scala. The moment with the hands and arms happens at about 1:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=RDuWNtLZG8bd4&v=uWNtLZG8bd4

She sings about her eyes at one point and we got an extreme close-up of her eyes, looking all-seeing and a little nutty. There was another angry moment with the operator and another caller - - Hannigan gave the downbeats with quick jabs of her fist, like a boxer. That was amusing. There were many moments of humor in the piece.

I realized about ten minutes in (it’s about 45 minutes long) that I wasn’t really concentrating on her singing. I wondered if that was a problem but realized that her singing was just one element of the performance. The video and her conducting were just as central in the storytelling as her singing. Jere made the point that none if it would have worked if her singing hadn't been extraordinary. I was impressed with all of the colors she found in her voice - - her voice was sweet, wounded, harsh, lots of great effects.

There was a longish sequence about halfway through when the image of her was frozen on the screen with little wispy tech doodles dotted around the image. I thought this was a technical mishap but then Hannigan turned towards the audience and sang to us for the next few minutes. The subtitles continued as usual so I thought the frozen image must have been a deliberate choice (Jere and Dale confirmed this happened at the same time in their performance as well, so it's official). We went back to the live video after maybe three or four minutes. It was an interesting choice to break down the fourth wall and a nice change to have her facing us, it was intimate and direct.

There was another double image moment later on with Hannigan seen in profile on the left and the right, her swirling horizontal conducting movements seeming to be her character reaching out to herself. That had a big emotional impact, it humanized her character. We had another extreme close-up, this time of her mouth. It’s a little overpowering to see someone’s mouth forty feet wide.

The opera ended with the image of Hannigan getting more and more blurry as her character lost consciousness. The last image we saw was a large wispy white blob. The blob gave a final downbeat, the hall went completely black, and the audience went MENTAL. This is something I read about opera singers performing in New York, they love it because the audiences are so enthusiastic. We all screamed and applauded like there was no tomorrow. The lights came back up (of course) and Hannigan turned to acknowledge our applause. She turned to the orchestra and did the usual rising, sweeping gesture asking them to stand up. They did and we applauded them.

She left the stage, came back a second time, bowed, turned to the orchestra and made the “stand up” gesture but they did not! I’m sure they were taking their cue from the concertmaster or maybe they had planned this out before, but they remained seated and applauded her. The string players were holding their instruments so they waved their bows in the air. It was a profound and deeply generous gesture from them. This was repeated on her third bow but then they finally did stand up for her fourth and final bow.

It’s pointless to think of what Cocteau or Poulenc would have thought about his performance but I think they would have been blown away and thrilled by her artistry, her level of commitment, and the staggering technological element of the performance.