An American Dream?

“For me, every album is a statement,” Barbara Hannigan tells Apple Music Classical. “It should have a dramaturgical structure and be a kind of philosophical statement. I wouldn’t have done An American Dream? if I wasn’t so sad about the way I saw things going.” The Canadian soprano and conductor’s album explores the role music has played in building community and uniting disparate peoples. Those qualities were cultivated in the 20th century’s first half by a remarkable generation of American composers, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Richard Rodgers and Jule Styne among them, whose parents fled poverty or oppression in Europe for better lives in the US. An American Dream? opens with 1942’s Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture, tailored by Gershwin’s friend and former assistant Robert Russell Bennett to suit precise specifications from Fritz Reiner, the Hungarian-born conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. “Gershwin is number one, for me,” says Hannigan. “He’s up there with the greats. And this Symphonic Picture from Porgy and Bess is some of the greatest music I’ve ever had the chance to perform.” The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra turn on the style with a performance of rhythmic precision, tonal variety and thrilling energy. An American Dream? also includes Dance Symphony, an underplayed gem from the late 1920s. Copland compiled the piece from material recycled from his earlier ballet score Grohg, mostly written in Paris and directly inspired by F.W. Murnau’s expressionist vampire film Nosferatu. “Grohg is not a great title! But Dance Symphony is much more attractive. When I imagine the ballet, knowing the music as I do, I honestly don’t want to see a procession of coffins or a corpse brought back to life. I’m happy that it got turned into a concert piece. It’s really fun for the musicians and listeners.” Hannigan’s passion for Gershwin led to the creation of the album’s closing work, At the Fair, a suite of showstoppers by Billy Barnes, Jule Styne and others. She worked on its arrangement with Bill Elliott, best known for orchestrating the Broadway musical An American in Paris. It opens with Barnes’ cabaret song “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?”, a hit from Barbra Streisand’s second solo album, and ends with “Don’t Rain on My Parade”. In between is a central collage of familiar tunes. The work, she notes, helps explain the album title’s question mark. “The first song is very reflective, with the character wondering if this was the right way to go. Did I stay too long at the fair? Did I spend my life doing the right things? And when we look at how America has gone and at our choices in capitalism—how we spend our money, how we look after our land and how we look after each other—we might ask: did we do it the right way? And how are we going to deal with the repercussions of our choices?” For the central “An American Dream”, Hannigan chose pieces that evoke powerful personal memories. She and Elliott shaped them into an instrumental interlude intensified by the final collision of multiple melodies. “It was very moving to do,” she recalls. The section begins with pizzicato echoes of “Make Em’ Laugh” from Singin’ in the Rain. “I put that in as a statement about not really digging deep. It’s about distracting ourselves to the point where we spend hours every day on social media instead of trying to understand what’s going on so we can actually have a dialogue.” At The Fair ends with Hannigan’s visceral performance of “Don’t Rain on My Parade”, ominous and optimistic by turns. “It’s a real grab-and-run kind of song—take what you can and get out of there,” she says. “I’m not putting it in the context of the moment in Funny Girl when Barbra Streisand decides to follow her heart; I’m using it in a much larger context. It can be perceived in a selfish way. But in the context of the other material that’s come before in the suite, it’s asking how much do I look after myself and how much do I look after my community?”