Coming off the immense success of the Billboard-charting Let me tell you which received rave reviews from the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Wall St. Journal, and many more Barbara Hannigan turns her attention to the work of Erik Satie as the musical world celebrates his 150th birthday. The disc focuses on one of the minimalist composer s few elaborate masterpieces: the almost-forgotten vocal piece Socrate, on three Plato dialogues in French translation.
Artwork [Drawings] – Erik Satie
Composed By – Erik Satie
Engineer [Balance Engineer] – Bastiaan Kuijt
Executive-Producer – Mariko Takahashi (2), Stefan Winter
Layout, Design – Winter & Winter
Lyrics By – Catulle Mendès (tracks: 5), Erik Satie (tracks: 7), J.P. Contamine de Latour (tracks: 1 to 4, 6), Victor Cousin (tracks: 8 to 10)
Mastered By – Adrian von Ripka
Mixed By – Guido Tichelman
Other [Piano Service And Tuning] – Ehud Loudar
Photography By [Barbara Hannigan, Reinbert de Leeuw] – Elmer de Haas
Photography By [Erik Satie - 1896] – Archives De La Fondation Erik Satie
Piano – Reinbert de Leeuw
Producer – Stefan Winter
Producer [Recording Producer] – Guido Tichelman
Soprano Vocals – Barbara Hannigan
Made in Germany
Recorded September 2015

Whether singing, conducting, dancing or acting, the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan is a constant source of fascination. Alpha Classics is proud to enter her world and her very first album as singer and conductor in 2017: with the Amsterdam based orchestra Ensemble Ludwig, of which she is associate artist.
Barbara Hannigan has devised a programme including Berg's Lulu Suite and Gershwin's Girl Crazy in a Suite newly arranged by the multi award- winning American composer Bill Elliott. To complement these two pieces, she has recorded Berio's spectacular Sequenza III for solo voice.
An outstanding soprano, a distinguished interpreter of the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, an all-round artist who creates a sensation on concert platforms and in opera houses throughout the world, Barbara Hannigan has enriched her palette over the past few years by devoting a portion of her activities to conducting. This album in the form of a musical portrait of the artist, is completed by a DVD of a film made by Mathieu Amalric during the rehearsals and recording sessions. It plunges into the heart of the orchestra with a very personal look at the exchanges between conductor and musicians.
Over the next few years, Alpha will accompany Barbara Hannigan in a number of projects from very varied horizons.

This album celebrates dance music, from waltz to tango, from slow foxtrot to quickstep, from samba to jive. Seventy years of music rooted in the 1920s, assembled by the enthusiastic musicians of the Ludwig Orchestra, who have taken to playing them at festivals, alongside their usual programmes devoted to Stravinsky or Schoenberg, to get the audience dancing – a phenomenal success story that now becomes an album, Dance with me! For this project, the Ludwig musicians naturally turned to a partner dear to their hearts, Barbara Hannigan, with whom they recorded the famous recording Crazy Girl Crazy (ALPHA293), which received a Grammy Award in 2018, in collaboration with composer-arranger Bill Elliott. The trio has reformed here: ‘I was thrilled to go back to this aspect of my musical roots, to reawaken special memories of singing and playing keyboards with a dance band in Nova Scotia’, says Barbara Hannigan. ‘Couples were smiling and dancing to tunes like Moonlight Serenade and In the Mood with a few polkas thrown in towards the end of the evening.’ The Canadian soprano performs four songs, including I could have danced all night, Moonlight Serenade and Kurt Weill’s famous and moving Youkali . More musicians round out the guest-list for the party – the trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin-Vary and the Berlage Saxophone Quartet. Dance with me : an invitation to feel happy and light-hearted, quite an achievement these days . . .

Barbara Hannigan writes: “Sehnsucht, a central and nearly untranslatable word of the Viennese fin-de-siècle period, referring to aspects of longing, melancholy, and nostalgia. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a collective Sehnsucht arose, in performers and audiences alike. Sehnsucht: Live in Rotterdam, played to the empty concert hall of De Doelen. We decided to issue the recording as an album, recognizing that the performance also represents continuity and mentorship through music. Both young Dutch artists, conductor Rolf Verbeek and baritone Raoul Steffani are associated with the initiatives Equilibrium and Momentum, and joined me and the Camerata RCO for this intimate journey… In Sehnsucht, we explore two song cycles of Berg, written shortly after Mahler’s 4th Symphony. All these works are presented in special arrangements for chamber ensemble. The Berg songs are expanded from their original voice and piano to a dialogue of new colors and instrumentation. Mahler’s 4th Symphony is reduced to an intimate soloistic journey, a tender conversation.”

After the huge success of her first album for Alpha, Crazy Girl Crazy (Alpha 293), which received a Grammy Award, a JUNO Classical Award in Canada, the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, FFFF in Télérama and DIAMANT in Opéra Magazine and was BBC Music Magazine CD of the Month, Barbara Hannigan is back with her long-time collaborator, the Dutch pianist and great interpreter of twentieth-century music Reinbert de Leeuw, for a recital exploring the roots of modern music, with the composers who left their mark on the turn of the twentieth century: Hugo Wolf (Mignon Lieder), Arnold Schoenberg (Vier Lieder op.2), Anton Webern (Fünf Lieder nach Gedichten von R. Dehmel), Alexander Zemlinsky (selected lieder), Alma Mahler (Die stille Nacht etc.) and Alban Berg (Sieben frühe Lieder). From what has been called the Second Viennese School, an incredible mix of musicians, painters, writers and other artists frequenting salons and cafés, a completely new musical language was born. Barbara Hannigan is especially fond of this repertory and has long championed it. Of course, we think of Berg and his unforgettable Lulu: ‘The artist who sings’, as journalists often like to describe her, embodies this music with her legendary dramatic sense, making each of these lieder a story in itself, even a mini-opera . . .