The White Book

Program notes

About the Work

The White Book is a substantial new work for soprano and orchestra by Laura Bowler, shaped around Barbara Hannigan’s voice and stage presence; these concerts are its UK premiere, and the LSO is one of the three orchestras that commissioned it. It takes its title and text from the acclaimed novel The White Book by the Korean writer Han Kang (winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature), a spare, poetic, fragmentary meditation on grief, mortality and survival, built around the narrator’s older sister who died only two hours after being born. Han Kang structures her book around white things (snow, salt, rice, fog, a baby’s gown, a shroud), using the colour white as a thread linking life and death, presence and absence. Bowler has fashioned from this a deeply personal exploration of loss.

As a brand-new piece, it comes without the familiarity that surrounds the Ligeti and Strauss that follow, and that is part of its power. Bowler is a composer-vocalist with a strong theatrical instinct and an unusually visceral feeling for the voice, and in Hannigan she has the ideal interpreter: a soprano of fearless range and dramatic commitment who has built her career on bringing brand-new music to vivid life. The result is a major contemporary statement that opens the programme, setting an intimate, searching meditation on grief against the cosmic scale of the Strauss to come.

What to Listen For

Approach this with open ears: you are hearing music at the very start of its life. Without recordings to anticipate, follow the soprano: listen for how Bowler uses Hannigan’s extraordinary voice, by turns singing, speaking, whispering and crying out, to embody Han Kang’s fragmentary text about a lost sister and the colour white.

Listen for the relationship between voice and orchestra (whether the orchestra cushions, shadows, threatens or overwhelms the solo line) and for the work’s emotional architecture as it moves through the novel’s images of snow, fog, salt and shrouds. Bowler is a theatrical composer, so expect strong contrasts of texture and atmosphere: moments of fragile, frozen stillness set against more agitated or anguished passages. Above all, listen to the words and the voice together, and to the way a living composer and a great singer collaborate to turn a meditation on grief and white things into sound for the first time.