A new retelling of “The Snow Queen” is aimed squarely at adults

PUBLISHED IN 1844, “The Snow Queen” has had many updates and remakes. Hans Christian Andersen’s wintry fable even lies behind “Frozen”, Disney’s animated blockbuster from 2013, a sequel to which has recently been released. For his first opera, Hans Abrahamsen—a Danish compatriot of Andersen’s and composer—has transformed the tale of a girl’s quest for a lost friend bewitched by icy powers into a sparkling snowscape of orchestral and vocal colours. His music swirls and settles in tantalising, exquisite and occasionally sinister patterns.

Mr Abrahamsen, now 67, has often proved his mastery of winter music through minutely detailed scores that build into shimmering, fractal wonderlands of sound. One of his most ambitious works is simply entitled “Snow”. His setting of “The Snow Queen” originally opened with a Danish libretto in Copenhagen in October: the Danish Royal Opera, which commissioned the work, had stipulated a Danish text. However, he had written it with Barbara Hannigan, a Canadian soprano, in mind for the main part of Gerda. The singer and conductor’s collaboration with Mr Abrahamsen has already resulted in an icily beautiful song cycle with words derived from Ophelia’s lines in “Hamlet”. That won the Grawemeyer Award—a leading honour for classical music—and recently topped a critics’ survey of this century’s best compositions.