La voix humaine | London Symphony Orchestra

Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Poulenc’s La voix humaine: two stories of emotion in the raw from Barbara Hannigan, an artist who shoots straight for the heart and never misses.

Elderly and afraid, Richard Strauss saw his world burning – and poured all his agony into a searing wordless elegy for string orchestra. Francis Poulenc took a script by Cocteau about a woman in despair, and transformed it into an opera like no other; a telephone call that burns itself onto your memory.

In other words, this is a concert that’s pure Barbara Hannigan – the Canadian soprano and conductor whose performances are as fearless as they are penetrating. ‘I find my comfort zone in the wilderness’, she says, and tonight she appears both as conductor and as the central figure in the one-woman opera that Poulenc described as ‘tender and violent, living and cruel, sentimental and sensual’. Expect no compromises: just uncompromising emotion, and souls stripped bare.