Soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan has been named the Ojai Festival Music Director for the 2019 season. She is known worldwide as a soprano of vital expressive force directed by exceptional technique, who is now bringing that same high energy and expertise to her varied activities as a conductor while continuing to work as a singer. This last fall she made her North American conducting debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, while singing at the same time, in a program of Nono, Haydn, Mozart, Ligeti, and Stravinsky.
In January 2016 she released the recording of Hans Abrahamsen's let me tell you, and performed the work with The Cleveland Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra in Cleveland, Boston, and New York's Carnegie Hall. Hannigan pressed for the Berlin Philharmonic to commission this Grawemeyer Award-winning piece after she was asked to sing at a surprise birthday party for her friend, writer and critic Paul Griffiths. let me tell you gives Ophelia the opportunity to retell her own story, using only the 481-word vocabulary given to her in Shakespeare‘s Hamlet. Read The New York Times review here and The Boston Globe profile here.
From a much applauded debut conducting Stravinsky’s Renard at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Hannigan has gone on to work with orchestras including the Gothenburg Symphony, WDR Symphony Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, and l’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. As a performer herself, she enjoys a warm rapport with orchestral players, and this communicates itself in her concerts, while her programming has music old and new striking sparks off each other. Her conducting debut at the Concertgebouw with Ludwig Orchestra won the Ovatie 2014 award for best classical concert of the year in the Netherlands.
In January 2016 she released the recording of Hans Abrahamsen's let me tell you, and performed the work with The Cleveland Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra in Cleveland, Boston, and New York's Carnegie Hall. Hannigan pressed for the Berlin Philharmonic to commission this Grawemeyer Award-winning piece after she was asked to sing at a surprise birthday party for her friend, writer and critic Paul Griffiths. let me tell you gives Ophelia the opportunity to retell her own story, using only the 481-word vocabulary given to her in Shakespeare‘s Hamlet. Read The New York Times review here and The Boston Globe profile here.
From a much applauded debut conducting Stravinsky’s Renard at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Hannigan has gone on to work with orchestras including the Gothenburg Symphony, WDR Symphony Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, and l’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. As a performer herself, she enjoys a warm rapport with orchestral players, and this communicates itself in her concerts, while her programming has music old and new striking sparks off each other. Her conducting debut at the Concertgebouw with Ludwig Orchestra won the Ovatie 2014 award for best classical concert of the year in the Netherlands.
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