Hannigan and
Gothenburg
Symphony
Orchestra

Painfully beautiful  

Few experiences hurt more than being abandoned. Francis Poulenc’s opera La Voix humaine, based on Jean Cocteau’s monodrama, captures such a farewell: a final, fragile telephone conversation between a woman and the man who now loves another. 

Barbara Hannigan has been described by The New York Times as “a daring singer and conductor with a reputation for innovative concert programmes”. In La Voix humaine, she leads both the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and the intense drama through live cameras on stage, challenging the traditional boundaries between conductor, singer and actor in real time. 

The production has been internationally acclaimed as one of the most innovative works of music theatre of our time and is regularly invited to leading opera houses and concert venues around the world. 

Impressive, intense and enveloping 

– Ôlyrix, French opera magazine  

A musical memorial 

The concert opens with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen. Written towards the end of the Second World War, the piece is regarded as one of his final major and most deeply moving masterpieces. In this work, Strauss lets 23 solo strings speak with individual voices – a collective expression of grief over the devastation of war and a cultural heritage in ruins. 

The bombing of opera houses in Munich, Dresden, Vienna and Berlin made a profound impression on Strauss, who experienced the loss of the Munich Court Theatre in particular as a personal catastrophe. Both his father had played in the orchestra there for 49 years, and several of Strauss’s own works had received their premieres on that stage. 

The music is permeated by loss, yet also by a quiet, almost stoic dignity – an artist looking back on all that once was, and all that no longer exists. 

The greatest catastrophe of my life, for which there is no consolation, and, in my old age, no hope ... 

– Richard Strauss