Barbara Hannigan as singer and conductor of the Czech Philharmonic in the Czech premiere of her own fabled adaptation of Francis Poulenc’s opera La Voix humaine, featuring a live video screening.

Artist-in-Residence of the Prague Spring 2026 Barbara Hannigan is one of the most original figures in the sphere of classical music. With her typical courage and determination she sings and also conducts, she inspires the finest contemporary composers in their endeavours, and she creates unique projects which go far beyond the customary concert experience. Born in Canada, she has performed the premieres of more than one hundred works. She collaborates with some of the world’s most distinguished conductors and orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic. She is Principal Guest Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, she holds the positions of Associate Artist of the London Symphony Orchestra and the Première Artiste Invitée of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and in the autumn of 2026 she will take up her post as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Her exceptional artistic achievements are moreover reflected in a number of prestigious awards, among them a Grammy Award, the title Artist of the Year from Gramophone magazine, and the Polar Music Prize 2025, a Swedish international award established by music publisher and manager of ABBA Stig Anderson, which she won together with jazzman Herbie Hancock and the rock band Queen. Her Prague Spring residency will consist of four concerts.

We will fully appreciate the artist’s unique talent in the third concert of her festival residency, where she will appear not only as a singer and actress, but also as the conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. “This will be the Czech premiere of my production of Poulenc’s opera La Voix humaine, which involves live video by means of three cameras placed within the orchestra, and a large screen behind the players. The opera, with texts by Jean Cocteau, seems to be the final conversation between a woman and her (ex)lover. But the text constantly returns to the importance the woman places on fantasy, imagination, truth and lies. It becomes clear that this character needs to live in her own version of reality (as do we all…) and her isolation and emotional intensity brings the opera to a heartbreaking finish. I have paired Poulenc’s opera with Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss (1864–1949), in which we see the emotional landscape as the Second World War was coming to its end,” Barbara Hannigan tells us. Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, completed on 12 April 1945, is a late, immensely personal work by the then 81-year-old composer, sometimes described as Strauss’s epitaph of a German culture destroyed by war. The piece, most likely inspired by Goethe’s poem Niemand wird sich selber kennen (No-one will ever know himself), ends with a quotation of Marcia funebre from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, beneath which, on the final page of his autograph, Strauss wrote the words “In memoriam!”