Crazy Girl Crazy

This is a terrific album from the multi-talented Barbara Hannigan. She not only conducts this dynamic young orchestra but does so while singing. Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III is the most radical work here, and Hannigan embraces its complexity with ease and enormous conviction. As Lulu, in Lulu Suite, Berg’s powerful little prequel to the opera, Hannigan brings all her stage experience to create a miniature portrait of this most mesmerising of operatic victims. Gershwin’s Girl Crazy Suite is full of the best songs, many now standards, which Hannigan does in a way that miraculously seems to be from a world similar to Berg's.