Winter & Winter CD let me tell you receives Diapason d’Or award
24th November 2016
let me tell you is written for Hannigan and was commissioned by The Berlin Philharmonic who premiered the work in December 2013. Since then she has given over 20 performances of the work, most recently at this year’s BBC Proms with the CBSO and Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla.
In the work, Ophelia tells her story in a first person narrative devised by Griffiths using only the 481 word vocabulary given to her in Shakespeare‘s Hamlet. He uses a constrained writing technique similar to those employed by the avant-garde Oulipo group. It is a text of delicate and fragile atmosphere and the selections for the song cycle have been a joint effort by all three artists.
Abrahamsen’s ground-breaking orchestral song cycle has attracted critical acclaim across the world, receiving the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Large Scale Composition in 2015, the Grawemeyer Award earlier this year, and the Nordic Council Music Prize earlier this month.
For the complete list of this year's Diapason d'Or award winners click here.
Purchase let me tell you here: iTunes | Amazon | Winter & Winter
Hans Abrahamsen (b.1952)
In a creative life of almost half a century, Hans Abrahamsen has more than once had the courage to stop, and the equal courage to start again – freshly, out of a clear reconsideration of where he was before. His allegiances are shown by the roll of composers whose works he has, as a master orchestrator, reconceived: Bach and Ligeti, Nielsen and Schumann, Schoenberg and Debussy. But he has long discovered his own terrain – quite often a snowscape, as in his early masterpiece Winternacht or the work in which he found his fully mature style, Schnee (2006-8), generally acknowledged one of the rare classics of the twenty-first century.
Besides these two pieces for instrumental ensemble, his output includes four string quartets, a collection of ten piano studies (some of which he has recomposed in other forms), concertos for piano, for piano and violin, and for piano left hand, and a monodrama for soprano and orchestra, let me tell you. He is currently at work on his first opera, after Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen.
© Paul Griffiths
