The soprano Barbara Hannigan took her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees at the University of Toronto, where she studied with Mary Morrison, and completed her training at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Orford Arts Centre, the Steans Institute Ravinia and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Her operatic rôles included Lucia in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Despina, the title rôle in The Cunning Little Vixen and Amore in Glucks’s Orfeo ed Euridice. She made her début at the Lincoln Center in Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer. Her performance repertoire included Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, and oratorio and Mass settings by Handel, Bach and Haydn.