Barbara Hannigan Sings Zorn ft. Stephen Gosling

In the last 50 years, very few artists have been as boundless as John Zorn, from his ideas to his energy to his organization. After first emerging in the experimental Wild West of New York’s downtown scene in the ’70s, the span and scale of Zorn’s work have only seemed to increase over the intervening decades. From his breakthrough reinterpretations of Ennio Morricone and ground-breaking musical “games” like Cobra to his splenetic art-grindcore with Naked City, from his jazz-reorienting in Masada to his compositional gauntlets like Moonchild and Incerto, Zorn has packed several lifetimes of music-making into 72 years. He seems to have only grown more active and tireless of late. Zorn has also been a crucial catalyst for the development of experimental music, whether establishing his great Tzadik label or his New York space The Stone, or convening brilliant bands that otherwise might not have come into existence. After making his Big Ears debut in 2022 and celebrating his 70th birthday here in 2023, Zorn returns to Big Ears with a staggering cast of collaborators for two days at the Bijou Theatre.

“It’s the kind of piece that leaves you asking, repeatedly, over the course of its 25 minutes: Can a voice even do this?” The New York Times’ Joshua Barone asked in 2019, just before the New York premiere of “Jumalattaret,” by one of the world’s premier vocalists, Barbara Hannigan. Zorn did not write the piece about Finnish goddesses for Hannigan; when he finished it in 2012, he would not meet Hannigan for another three years. But when she began to tackle the endlessly amoebic piece, where pastoral passages suddenly split open into sudden bursts of soprano acrobatics, she recognized that it not only seemed written for her voice but also was one of the most difficult and stunning works ever written for any human voice. Though she’d premiered more than 100 vocal pieces by some of the world’s great composers, “Jumalattaret” pushed Hannigan—who also becomes the chief conductor and artistic director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in 2026—to new places. In this intimate program, she will revisit the work—and others by Zorn, including his contemplation of Emily Dickinson, “Split the Lark”—alongside esteemed pianist Stephen Gosling.

Ensemble:

Barbara Hannigan

Stephen Gosling