Hans Abrahamsen (DK)
From Kongens Lyngby
Hans Abrahamsen has no upcoming shows in the Netherlands right now. Leave your email address and we’ll tell you the moment a date is announced.
Is Hans Abrahamsen coming to the Netherlands?
Stay in the loop
Like Hans Abrahamsen and new shows appear on your homepage.
About
Hans Abrahamsen wrote a piece that critics at The Guardian ranked as the finest work of the 21st century so far: let me tell you, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra, premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic with Barbara Hannigan singing and Andris Nelsons conducting. It also won him the $100,000 Grawemeyer Award in 2016. The Danish composer started out in the "New Simplicity" camp, writing deliberately plain music as a reaction against the knotty Darmstadt avant garde, before drifting toward a personal dialogue with Romanticism. Hans Werner Henze became an early champion after the Berlin Philharmonic played Nacht und Trompeten in 1982. Then came a long silence. Between 1990 and 1998 he finished just one short song, paralyzed, as he put it, by the white paper. He came back through new orchestrations of Bach and a sparer, sharper style, giving us Schnee, the left hand piano concerto Left, alone, and his opera The Snow Queen, which won a Gramophone award for its recording. Vers le silence, written in lockdown, took the Prince Pierre of Monaco composition prize in 2024.
