Customer Reviews

Sings Peter Lieberson: Neruda Songs

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It is impossible not to be moved by this wondrous recording by the estimable mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who passed away much too soon at age 52 last year. Possessing one of the most vividly lustrous and naturally radiant voices, she peaked at a later age than most of her fellow singers, allowing her the time and experience to build greater depth and texture into her exquisite interpretations. Sadly, Hunt Lieberson recorded sporadically during her career since she was something of a maverick when it came to managing her career. Beyond her exquisite vocal work on 2004's "Handel Arias" and 2003's "Bach Cantatas BWV 82 & 199", one of my prized possessions is the 2004 DVD of her luminous performance as Irene in the 1996 Glyndebourne Festival production of Handel's "Theodora".

With this posthumous release, we are fortunate to have a recording of her November 2005 performance in Boston's Symphony Hall under the baton of James Levine. Running scarcely over half an hour, the disc is all too brief, but the emotionalism is pungent with every movement. Impressed deeply by several love sonnets written by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, her husband Peter, the composer son of ballerina Vera Zorina and longtime Columbia Records CEO Goddard Lieberson, wrote lush musical settings for five of them. Each poem reveals a facet of love distinctive in its pronouncement as the succession of pieces moves from openly rapturous to inevitable grief at separation. One cannot help but draw parallels between the emotional arc of the compositions and Hunt Lieberson's long-running bout with cancer and her pending fate.

When one hears the unadorned joy in her voice in the first poem, "If your eyes were not the color of the moon", the intractable bond between composer and performer is palpable. The third poem, "Don't go far off, not even for a day" reflects an artist with an innate and highly plangent sense of her brief time on earth. However, it is the fifth poem, "My love, if I die and you don't", which really tugs most at the heartstrings as she sings of the eternal fate of true love in spite of any earthbound limitations a couple will face. The most sublime moment comes when she repeats the word "amor" at the end with a dream-like, faraway tone. This is magnificent, transcendent work from a singer for the ages and a composer whose enduring love for his wife has inspired his most profound work.

If Strauss' Vier Letzte Lieder was the great swan song that was hailed by many as the greatest lieder cycle set on score, then Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs, sung by his late wife Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, is perhaps the most insightful, passionate, and beautiful song cycle of our century. It harkens elements of Strauss' dissonant lyricism with a modern texture reminiscent of Webern and Berg, yet without the blaring atonality that detracts several novice listeners to their music. His careful, delicate orchestration sets a cool, plangent mood to the text of Neruda's poetry like a glove, and I adore the detail he gives the music. It does not sound overpowering, and rightly so because Neruda's fluid, passionate poetry deserves such a treatment.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, in my opinion, is the greatest Handelian mezzo of the last two decades. Her committment to the music, her consummate artistry, and her gorgeous voice makes everything she touches a reference without the affected mannerisms of singers like Renee Fleming. I adore her Handel album (both of them!) and I love this even more! It is simply a most touching work, with honors going to the fifth song beginning with the words "My love, if I die, and you don't." She treats it with such love, such passion, that I ended up crying when she uttered that phrase. An artist like her will surely be remembered for the short, yet wonderful things she did in her prime unfortunately cut short.

This recording documents, tragically, that American mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died at the absolute peak of her artistic and interpretive powers. These five sad, lush songs by her husband Peter Lieberson are a glowing tribute to her, and to the mutual respect and devotion that singer and composer had for the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Lorraine's amazing voice was the inspiration for these songs, and it is difficult to conceive how anyone else could sing them so exquisitely. If Peter Lieberson was trained in serial composition then this work harkens back to the roots of that music in turn of the century Vienna, though less Mahler perhaps than the dark beauty of the Berg Violin Concerto. One might debate if that is the right sound-world for Neruda's poetry, but when the whole cycle is so amazingly performed, that kind of discussion seems beside the point. If you admire great singing, and great songs, you will want to own this astonishing disk.

As a Pablo Neruda fan, I was swept away by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's interpretations and Peter's compositions. They suspend time and the heart in aria. As Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "Her final legacy was the Neruda Songs, her husband's exceptional beautiful love letter to her. These are among the most sumptuous orchestral songs ever written, and they are also a profuoundly inspiring public farewell by lovers." For an introduction to Neruda's poetry, I suggest City Lights' The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems which I had the honor of editing. As Pulitzer Prize winning Chilean/American writer Ariel Dorfman wrote, "What better way to celebrate the hundred years of Neruda's glorious residence on our earth than this selection of crucial works - in both languages! - by one of the greatest poets of all time. A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again." The Bloomsbury Review wrote, "The call for a more accessible collection of Neruda's important poems is answered with City Lights' The Essential Neruda, a 200-page edition that offers 50 of Neruda's key poems. The editors and translators know how to extract gold from a lifetime of prolific writing. If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it." The book makes an important accompanimient to Lorraine's incredible recording.

Peace,
Mark Eisner

There are great love stories about artists through the centuries but few would equal the purity of the love story of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Peter Lieberson. History will always remember this treasured couple for their individual gifts to music (Lorraine with her inimitable mezzo voice intrinsically involved in whatever she elected to sing and Peter for his lushly beautiful yet rewardingly avant garde compositions) and it is so very fitting that the final moments from their lives together should have been a song cycle on which they collaborated. This listener heard the performance of the Neruda Songs in May 2005 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a passionate, soaringly resonant and rich evocation of the language and the soul of Pablo Neruda's poetry: Lieberson was incomparable.

It is so fitting that she left with us a live performance of the five songs written for her by her husband with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Levine (the cycle was co-commissioned by both the Los Angeles and Boston forces). The result is now a gold standard of not only the magnificence of this erotically charged cycle but also of the eloquence of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's voice and legacy. The cycle of five poems is some of the finest writing for voice and orchestra to grace our halls in some years. And while it is impossible to find a flaw in either the composition or the performance, the breathless closing of the cycle (in translation) 'But love, this love has not ended: just as it never had a birth, it has no death: it is like a long river, only changing lands, and changing lips' and then the repeated 'amor, amor, amor.....'. There are few works so perfectly created, so sublimely performed. This is a recording that will never tarnish but only gleam with age. Grady Harp, January 06

I first encountered Lorraine Hunt Lieberson at the San Francisco Symphony's performance of Mahler's 2nd, in which her aria stopped time. I found myself quietly weeping, and looking around, I was not alone with teary eyes. The recording of that symphony night does not have the same effect, though it is still wonderful. But on this CD, when I listened to her sing these poetic Spanish songs put to music by her husband, again I am moved to the depths of my very being. Her death was a tragic loss but her sublime vocal powers are preserved here for us to experience. Excellent musical composition, profound poetry, great orchestral performance, heavenly singing: this is musical art at the highest level.

This is a recording of a live concert - audience noises are essentially absent. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's performance is transcendent and utterly full-blooded (not oxymoronic). Levine/BSO's playing is so marvellously and naturally molded to her singing. Agreed with the earlier reviewers: This surely is a front runner for definitive orchestral song cycle of the 21st century. It's like Mahler-Zemlinsky-R. Strauss (& a dash of Villa-Lobos) brought together in a Webern-Berg sound world. Any one who fails to be moved by #5 "Amor mio, si muero y tu no mueres" should have their pulse checked!

I first heard a clip of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's CD on NPR. Her voice stopped me from attending to other things and drew me to the most haunting music to come out of my radio since Joan Sutherland sang on the Texaco Metropolitan Opera. She sings the poems of Pablo Neruda put to music by her husband, Peter Lieberson, as if this were the last opportunity she would have of telling him how much she loves him. She died shortly after the CD was finished. I only wish she were given the time to sing Shakespeare's sonnets.

Suberb and heartbreaking! Oh that she were still alive.

I have rarely been so touched at a deep emotional level as I have been by this collection of five songs written as a passionate gift of love by composer Peter Lieberson for his wife, the mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, a transcendent artist. Everything about the work -- from the outpouring of glorious sound and passion from Ms Lieberson to the texts by Pablo Neruda to the rich sounds of the Boston Symphony under James Levine playing Lieberson's richly romantic music -- adds to the emotional power of the performance. If one then understands that this music was written during a time when Ms Hunt Lieberson was struggling with the cancer that ultimately killed her, that the recording was made not out of desperation but out of hope during one of her periods of modest remission, and that she died not long afterwards, it makes the experience all the more powerful.

One must add that there are two other similarly nonpareil recordings -- eerily enough with singers who were either mezzo-soprano or contralto -- that are classics at least partly because they were made just before the singers died: Jan de Gaetani's recording of her husband's chamber orchestrations of songs by Mahler and Berlioz (including a heartbreaking 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen') Jan DeGaetani Sings Berlioz, Mahler and, of course, Kathleen Ferrier's 'Das Lied von der Erde' Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde / Bruno Walter with the touching dying-away of her last words 'Ewig ... ewig ... ewig'.

One can only hope that Hunt Lieberson, Ferrier and de Gaetani are singing together in Heaven. Ave atque vale.

Scott Morrison