• Hans Abrahamsen
  • Snedronningen (2018)
    (The Snow Queen)

  • Edition Wilhelm Hansen Copenhagen (World)

Based on H.C. Andersen's 'The Snow Queen'

  • 4(4pic.2afl.bfl).3(ca).4(2bcl.2Ebcl).3(2cbn)/6(2tba).2+2btpt.3.1/timp.5perc/2hp.acn.syn.cel/str (12.12.8.8.6)
  • 12S,8B
  • 2S,Ms,C,2T,Ct,B
  • 1 hr 35 min
  • Hans Abrahamsen / Henrik Engelbrecht
  • Danish, English

Programme Note

The children, Gerda and Kay, are close friends. They live across an alley from each other and happily chat, play, and tend a rose which is growing in their backyard. The children are content until tragedy strikes: Kay’s eye and heart are pierced with fragments of a mirror, and the loving boy Kay then vanishes. The Snow Queen has put him under her spell and taken him to her palace of snow and ice. It is up to Gerda to find him and free him.

Scores

Danish version. For perusal only.
English version. For perusal only.

Features

  • Visual Operas
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    • Directors and visual artists increasingly devise innovative approaches for the presentation of opera. The past decade has been no exception, with several works from the Wise Music Catalogue finding their way into the theatre and concert hall, accompanied by compelling visuals.

Reviews

Gloriously realised, The Snow Queen is that rare thing, an adult fairy tale with a surface reading that is easy enough to follow while offering layers of deeper meaning for those willing to go there. Rarely do contemporary operatic stars align so perfectly.

Clive Paget, Limelight Magazine
21st March 2022
★★★★★★ It is 'The Snow Queen' as you know it from H. C. Andersen’s fairy tale – and yet not so. Because Hans Abrahamsen’s grasp of Andersen’s universe is so highly sensitive – and that has resulted in a poetic opera in a class of its own.

One can say that Abrahamsen in his musical rendition of 'The Snow Queen' has created a poem out of the fairy tale. It reaches poetic depths with impressive sound colours, in much the same way that Abrahamsen does in his work ‘let me tell you’, which has made the Danish composer world famous. There are many layers in Andersen’s fairy tale, but even more in Abrahamsen’s music.
Jakob Wivel, Børsen
21st October 2019
★★★★☆ The work’s greatest triumph, and the thing that will draw listeners back again and again, is the music. Abrahamsen’s score is a work of obsessively fine detail, of immense complexity calibrated to sound beguilingly simple, of silvery, perfumed lyricism overlaid with hallucinatory effects. Everything sounds both familiar and strangely warped. There are delicate references to familiar works — Strauss, Mahler, Bach, Wagner — more like snatches of memory than quotes; but just when things seem about to become recognisable, Abrahamsen will bend away from pure tonality to warp a note or twist an interval, to stab or spike through an arpeggio, to hurt us just enough to make us come back wanting more. It is a strange and wonderful thing.
Shirley Apthorp, Financial Times
15th October 2019
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ The music falls into majestically long phrases and shines like ice crystals in Hans Abrahamsen’s opera ‘The Snow Queen’. He does not shy away from high C’s and Wagnerian sea spray, as he unfolds the theme of ‘snow’ in his life’s most monumental work.
Thomas Michelsen, Politiken
15th October 2019

Discography

Hans Abrahamsen: The Snow Queen

Hans Abrahamsen: The Snow Queen
  • Label
    Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings
  • Catalogue Number
    B09KNGDMM2
  • Conductor
    Cornelius Meister
  • Ensemble
    Bayerisches Staatsorchester München / Bayerischer Staatsopernchor
  • Soloist
    Gerda: Barbara Hannigan Kay: Rachael Wilson Grandmother/Old Lady/Finn Woman: Katarina Dalayman Snow Queen/Reindeer/Clock: Peter Rose Princess: Caroline Wettergreen Prince: Dean Power Forest Crow: Kevin Conners Castle Crow: Owen Willets
  • Released
    14th January 2022

More Info