The Grawemeyer Award’s 2016 recipient was chosen early this year following a leak by Musical America. Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen has taken the title along with a $100,000 grant for his 30-minute song cycle for soprano and orchestra called let me tell you. The chilling piece reworks lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to tell a modern tale of Ophelia (Hamlet’s doomed sister who succumbs to madness), and was written expressly for Soprano Barbara Hannigan, a champion of modern music most recently known for her role in the English-language opera Written on Skin. According to GPB news, let me tell you is the first vocal piece that Hans Abrahamsen has ever written.
The Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition, as Hans Abrahamsen admitted to NPR, is among the top distinctions and most prestigious prizes for a composer. Awarded through the University of Louisville, the organization’s website says it “honors those who bring beauty and inspiration into the world”. Some of the composers it honored were in Abrahamsen’s thoughts when he spoke to NPR, citing Lutoslawski and Ligeti as composers whom he was surprised to be in the same league with.
The piece, let me tell you, channels the essence of madness and terror faced by Ophelia in the hours before her death, but this was not easily achieved by Hans Abrahamsen, who had consulted Soprano Barbara Hannigan for what NPR called a “crash course on the history of vocal music, singing for him excerpts of Mozart, Mahler, and Schoenberg, and instructing him in the finer points of her silvery, flexible voice.”
Originally planned to be announced today (November 30th), the University of Louisville officially announced on November 24th that the Grawemeyer Award was indeed going to Hans Abrahamsen after the information was leaked earlier in the week by Musical America.
