Barbara Hannigan & Czech Philharmonic

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.

“My second Prague Spring concert with the Czech Philharmonic features works very dear to me: Haydn’s Farewell Symphony with its tender finish, and in the second half we have another tone poem for strings, Schoenberg’s early work Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), in which a woman makes a heartbreaking confession to the love of her life. We follow this with Gershwin’s Girl Crazy Suite, which one might feel is a strange pairing (and, indeed, the reality that the two composers were friends and even tennis partners does seem absurd to some) but here we have two great composers dealing with rich harmony and the emotions of romantic love,” states Barbara Hannigan. In any case, as her residency draws to a close the artist invites us on an adventure, which she will open with the now legendary piece entitled The Unanswered Question by American musical visionary Charles Ives (1874–1954). The founder of the Ives & Myrick Insurance Company, he was the first to devise ways of structuring life-insurance packages that laid the foundations for modern estate planning. He only composed at weekends and on the train to work; although his music was decades ahead of its time, his work as a composer was largely ignored during his lifetime. To illustrate this point, we might mention the fact that, in 1947, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony, a work he had written forty years earlier. The Unanswered Question, a mystical work from the year 1908, is sometimes described as programme music, yet it would be more fitting to speak of philosophy transferred to music. In the introduction to the piece the composer writes that he is exploring “The Perennial Question of Existence”. Barely six minutes long, the work is discernibly structured into three independent layers: the first is created by the solo trumpet, the second by four flutes, and the third by the strings, which form some kind of serene background. The trumpet solo poses the question, while the four flutes, representing humanity, try to find an answer – at first softly, but later – as if frustrated that it cannot be found – growing increasingly more aggressive and agitated. Finally the trumpet asks the question one last time… And the response is an eloquent silence.