David Geffen Hall - La Voix humaine with Barbara Hannigan
Fri, Apr 24
|David Geffen Hall
Barbara Hannigan returns to the NY Phil with a spellbinding multimedia staging of La Voix humaine, paired with Strauss’s mournful Metamorphosen.
Time & Location
Apr 24, 2026, 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM
David Geffen Hall, 10 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023, USA
About the event
Event Overview From April 23 to 25, 2026, prepare for an intensely personal, dramatically rich evening with the New York Philharmonic at Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, as soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan — renowned for her singular blend of vocal brilliance and visionary stagecraft — redefines what opera can be.
At the heart of this arresting program is Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine, a one-act psychological drama based on Jean Cocteau’s searing monologue. In Hannigan’s hands, this becomes not merely a performance, but an emotional descent — a multimedia tour de force that lays bare the agony of a woman’s final phone call with her former lover. It’s operatic minimalism at its most powerful, intimate, and unflinchingly modern.
Complementing the emotional devastation of La Voix humaine is Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen — a lush, elegiac meditation written during the final days of World War II. Composed for 23 solo strings, Metamorphosen is Strauss’s lament for…