Not Only Opera

Get to the Gershwin: Barabara Hannigan and the LSO at the Barbican

Barbara Hannigan and the LSO
Barbican Hall
Stalls L30, £5 (friend’s offer)
17 March 2019
Barbican page

Programme
Ligeti, Concert Românesc
Haydn, Symphony no. 86
Berg, Lulu Suite
Gershwin, arr. Hannigan and Elliott, Girl Crazy Suite

I’m all in a tizz. I learn now that I am late to the party but I was not at all or in any way prepared to have the best performance of the Lulu Suite followed by Gershwin, no matter how Second Viennese-y the orchestration, nor however much Schoenberg liked Gershwin, nor however much intellectual sense it makes to put Lulu and Crazy Girl together. Intellectual sense but no emotional sense. I feel I’m playing right into Barbara Hannigan’s hands with my bullcrap of the sanctity of high art – but what about the sanctity of high art?! How on earth could you think it was appropriate to follow Lulu, about all the sadness of the world, with Gershwin? I feel I shall never recover.

Mr Not Only Opera tells me I overreact. Lulu, he says, is traditional opera misery, killing off the woman like male composers always do, the bitter end to a story of bottomless exploitation – it makes sense to follow it with something a bit more positive, where for a change the woman gets to survive. Why not? The programme note by Paul Griffiths says something similar: Lulu ‘is the spirit of freedom… she scorns death… murdered in one scenario, she simply finds herself in another’. I would argue that the quelling of such a spirit is the entire point of opera and play – but all of it is completely besides the point. Regardless what you think of the story of Lulu, the music is decidedly ‘sad’. It is decidedly not uplifting. It is decidedly ‘go and sit somewhere quiet and wait until you’ve come out the other side and the world seems real again’. It decidedly does not put me in the mood for Gershwin.

Which is a shame, as in a lot of other contexts I expect I probably would enjoy this particular Gershwin, jeujed to within an inch of its life by Bill Elliott. Hannigan certainly has a whale of a time, read it as liberated Lulu spirit or straightforward exhibitioning as you will, and the LSO, even though they look slightly like they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing (I may have been projecting) perform excellently. It’s all a lot of fun and goes down a treat with the audience, who responded with a liberated (Lulu spirit again, perhaps) joy that almost suggests they’d been sitting through all this Berg and Haydn piffle just to get to the Gershwin. Hey ho.

The Haydn in fact left me pretty cold – one of the ‘few composers in the whole of classical music who [is] funny’ he may be, as described by Hannigan, but even his little Symphony no. 86 needs a bit more rehearsal than it had been allowed for here to really sing as anything much more than generic Classical filler. Fair enough that Hannigan and the LSO instead spent a lot of time on the Ligeti, to tremendous effect – what a wonderful piece and a great idea as a concert opener, if you have the players for it. The LSO make it a showpiece, playing at breakneck pace, tightly together, full of colour, full of wit and bite.

It’s worth finally dwelling on how wonderful the Lulu Suite was. By nature of her extraordinary gifts Hannigan knows this music and what it means as probably no other conductor has ever known it. The LSO are alert, vibrant to the nuances of motivic drive she suggests; the layers of sound whisper over one another, entirely together but with the flexibility to pull apart where they need to while always retaining the integrity of each idea. Hannigan, as always as Lulu, melts my heart; maybe not as perfect as in other performances, maybe a touch hoarse at some points, but with such understanding of this music, of its inner motor, of its elasticity. How then she could follow it with Gershwin I feel I shall never understand.