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Barbara Hannigan is a soprano and conductor who specializes in avant-garde opera and vocal music. She has premiered over 85 new works, collaborating with many notable contemporary composers. She is also an advocate and mentor for young musicians, creating two initiatives as a means to provide support.

Hannigan was born on May 8, 1971, in Waverly, Nova Scotia, Canada, where she began her training. She studied at the University of Toronto, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1993 and her master's degree in 1998. Hannigan also studied at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Ravinia's Steans Music Institute, the Orford Arts Centre, and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Her teachers included Meinard Kraak and Neil Semer. She has premiered many contemporary works, including pieces by Henri Dutilleux, Louis Andriessen, and George Benjamin, among many others. Hannigan has sung and conducted performances of György Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre, and is especially noted for her performances as the title character in Alban Berg's Lulu and as Marie in Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten. She has appeared as a vocalist and conductor with numerous ensembles, such as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Gulbenkian Orchestra. She has recorded for several labels, including Deutsche Grammophon, Accentus, and Bel Air Classiques.

Hannigan has been the subject of several documentaries, including I'm a Creative Animal in 2014, and she was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2016. Committed to providing mentorship to younger musicians, Hannigan created the Equilibrium Young Artists initiative in 2017. That year, she made her debut recording as both vocalist and conductor with Crazy Girl Crazy on Alpha Classics, which won the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. In 2019, she was featured in the Nimbus release George Benjamin: Lessons in Love and Violence, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Opera Recording. Hannigan sang and conducted the Ludwig Orchestra on the 2020 Alpha album La Passione, featuring works by Haydn, Luigi Nono, and Gérard Grisey. That year, Hannigan created Momentum: Our Future Now, a support and mentorship initiative for young professional musicians. In 2021, she was awarded Denmark's Léonie Sonning Music Prize, and the following year, the London Symphony Orchestra appointed Hannigan its first-ever LSO Associate Artist. ~ Blair Sanderson & Keith Finke

Katia Labèque is a French pianist known for her longtime collaboration with her younger sister in the Katia & Marielle Labèque piano duo. She was born in 1950 in Hendaye, France, and she started playing the piano when she was five years old. She received early instruction from her mother Ada Cecchi, who was an accomplished pianist and former pupil of Marguerite Long. Her father was also a musician and sang in the choir of the Bordeaux Opera. Later, Labèque and her younger sister Marielle studied piano together under Lucette Descaves at the Paris Conservatory. After they graduated in 1968, they continued their education and enrolled in the cycle de perfectionnement under Jean Hubeau, where they focused on repertoire for two pianos. The following year, they released their debut album Olivier Messiaen: Visions De L'Amen. This was followed by several recordings in the '70s including Bartok: Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion, Rachmaninov: 24 Preludes; Suite No. 2, and Hindemith - Martinu. They became quite popular through their recordings and touring from around this time, but they gained worldwide acclaim after their 1980 album Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue sold over 500,000 copies. The duo became known for their interpretations of both standard repertoire and contemporary works, and composers such as Philip Glass, Luciano Berio, and Arvo Pärt have written pieces especially for them. Labèque was married to jazz fusion guitarist John McLaughlin in the '80s, and they toured together and recorded Belo Horizonte, Music Spoken Here, and Mediterranean. The duo explored Baroque repertoire in the late '90s and performed under many of the top conductors of the genre, including Simon Rattle, John Eliot Gardiner, and Andrea Marcon. After a ten-year-long break from recording, she cofounded the KML Recordings label with her sister in 2007. The label was dedicated to releasing their own recordings and those of young and experimental ensembles from other genres, such as Dream House, Kalakan, and Red Velvet. Labèque remained very active with the piano duo through the 2010s and recorded several albums on the KML label, including Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue; Bernstein: West Side Story and Minimalist Dream House. Since 2020, she has premiered works by Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner and appeared on the albums Nazareno: Bernstein, Stravinsky, Golijov, and Philip Glass: Cocteau Trilogy. ~ RJ Lambert

In the summer of 1098, a child was born to noble parents in Bermersheim, near Alzey, in modern-day Rheinhessen, and was christened Hildegard. By her own account, she was having visions at the age of five; her parents placed her in the care of a small nunnery when she was eight. Over an 81-year life-span, this remarkable woman would go on to lead the Abbey at Disibodenberg and found two further convents of her own; she wrote three major theological works and a number of shorter treatises on natural history, herbalism, and healing, as well as the first surviving morality play and a large number of hymns, antiphons, and sequences. Her correspondence gave counsel and advice to many of the most prominent figures of her time, even to Frederick Barbarossa himself. She performed healings and a celebrated exorcism, and -- an extremely rare privilege for a woman -- took several officially sanctioned public preaching tours. Hildegard of Bingen, the first composer whose biography is known and the first known to have composed both music and its texts, was one of the most remarkable and forceful individuals in Medieval Europe.

Hildebert and Mechtild, her parents, had promised their tenth child to the Church's service, and gave the precocious eight-year-old as a novice to Jutta of Spanheim, who led a small cell of nuns attached to the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, near Bingen and the cathedral town of Mainz. Hildegard took her vows at the age of 15, and on Jutta's death in 1136 succeeded her as prioress of the small eremitic community. In 1141, God granted her a vision of flaming tongues descending upon her from heaven, and she devoted her life to following this mystic vision. Pope Eugenius III officially validated her religious visions at the Synod of Trier in 1148 and gave her permission to record them in written form. In addition to her writings, she began to attract further women to her community, and, between 1147 and 1150, she founded (against the wishes of her male superiors at Disibodenberg) a new abbey at Rupertsberg in the Rhine valley. Her ministry thrived and she established a daughter abbey at Eibingen around 1165.She made four preaching tours through the German lands in the 1160s, and after her death in 1179, Popes Gregory IX and Innocent IV proposed her canonization, followed by Clement V and John XXII, to no avail.

With the aid and encouragement of her monastic secretary Volmar, Hildegard began to record her revelations in 1141; 26 visions comprise her first work, the Scivias, compiled over a ten-year period. Her prophetic and apocalyptic writings would later include the Liber vite meritorum (1158-63) and Liber divinorum operum (1163-70). In the interval between these volumes, Hildegard wrote two works on natural history (Physica) and medicine (Causae et curae), a commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, lives of two saints, and a number of surviving sermons on sundry topics. Her interest in devotional poetry first shows up in the Scivias. In the early 1150s, she collected a large number of liturgical and devotional poems, each with associated music, such as the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, which also included her liturgical drama the Ordo virtutum. She continued to enlarge and embellish this work throughout her life. The "Sybil of the Rhine" also left a voluminous correspondence -- some 300 surviving letters -- sending advice, prayers, teachings, encouragements, and often chastisement to popes, emperors, kings, archbishops, abbots, and abbesses throughout Europe. ~ Timothy Dickey