Hans Abrahamsen: The Snow Queen

Hans Abrahamsen’s first opera, The Snow Queen, won the Contemporary Award at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2022 in this filmed recording of the Bayerische Staatsoper’s staging, conducted by Cornelius Meister and released on the company’s own BSOrec label. It’s a notable result for a category that more often goes to a studio disc of shorter contemporary works, a full-length opera recording, running the entire course of a newly composed stage work rather than a single commissioned piece or a portrait-disc selection, took the prize instead.

About the opera

Abrahamsen, a Danish composer perhaps best known internationally for his song cycle let me tell you, wrote The Snow Queen to his own libretto, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, composing it between 2014 and 2018. It had its world premiere at the Bayerische Staatsoper in October 2019, and this recording documents that same production, Andreas Kriegenburg’s staging, with the house’s own orchestra and chorus under Cornelius Meister. Coming to opera relatively late in a career built substantially on orchestral and chamber works, Abrahamsen brought a similarly detailed, texturally precise approach to the stage: the piece is written in three acts and follows Andersen’s story of Gerda’s journey to rescue Kay from the Snow Queen’s realm, retaining the fairy tale’s mix of tenderness and unease rather than softening it into a more straightforwardly childlike telling.

About the performers

Barbara Hannigan, one of the most prominent sopranos working in contemporary opera and a noted advocate for new composition more broadly, leads the cast; she is joined by Rachael Wilson, Katarina Dalayman and Peter Rose. Cornelius Meister, general music director at the Bayerische Staatsoper at the time of this production, conducts the house’s own orchestra and chorus, the same forces Kirill Petrenko’s Mahler Seventh (also on BSOrec, and also a Gramophone Award winner the same year) draws on, giving the label two very different kinds of prize-winning recording from the same institution in a single awards cycle.

Why the format matters

This is a video release, a Blu-ray of the staged production, rather than an audio-only studio recording. For an opera built as much around Kriegenburg’s staging as around Abrahamsen’s score, that’s arguably the right format to document it in: a recording without the visual staging would only tell part of the story of what made this particular production work on stage. It’s worth knowing before buying, though, if you’re specifically after something to put on a CD shelf next to Abrahamsen’s other, more chamber-scaled recordings.

Why a full-length opera winning the Contemporary Award is notable

The Gramophone Contemporary Award more often goes to a studio disc of shorter, newer orchestral or chamber works, a portrait album of a living composer’s pieces, rather than a single sustained stage work captured in performance. A three-act opera, filmed complete rather than excerpted, competing in and winning that category says something about how substantial and fully achieved The Snow Queen was judged to be as a piece of contemporary composition in its own right, not simply as a curiosity because its composer was primarily known for other genres before this.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for a real, current recording, it’s not part of mmmusic’s recovered 1991–2018 archive, since the shop closed before this opera was even written. It’s new coverage, extending the same factual, verified approach we take with the archive to what’s actually being staged, recorded and awarded now.