Customer Reviews

Spanish Love Songs

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If you're under the Lorraine Hunt Lieberson spell, or you've not yet heard her and you're wondering about the effusive reviews of those who are avidly snapping up every recording she made during her too-short life, you won't be disappointed by this addition. It's classic Lorraine, with a pleasing variety of songs, the inimitable passion and depth of musical and dramatic engagement, in addition to "the voice."

Since it's a live recording, you are transported to an occasion in time, with an audience responding. The reminder that no further such occasions are possible, make a release like this all the more treasured. The booklet contains interesting comments from her fellow musicians about her musical impact and artistry.

When are we going to get her singing Didon on a Les Troyen release from the Met - both audio CD and DVD, please?!

This live recording from Caramoor in 2004 of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson & Joseph Kaiser w/2 excellent supporting pianists is a total pleasure. The rising Canadian tenor Joseph Kaiser shows that he can be persuasive in the song literature as well as in opera. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, of course, is a superb dramatic interpreter but proves in the Ravel vocalise that she can act with her voice even without words. The solos are wonderful but the duet work struck me as the most rewarding, particularly the unexpected and well dramatized Sondheim "Barcelona" encore. Any LHL fan will have to have this!

No one excels Lorraine Hunt. Her impact is so strong on someone who appreciates fine singing. Unfortunately now, her outstanding contribution to the art of singing exists only on her recordings. This album is another example of her versatility along with Schumann, Brahms and Mahler songs, Handel and Bach Operas, Oratorios and Cantatas. I only wish there were more.

This is one of my (admittedly many) favorites of Lorraine's recordings, and it demonstrates all the fundamental aspects of her artistry. The way she sings Granados, Luna, and Wolf - like no one else - turns entire traditions of singing on their head and makes me hear anew entire genres of music. For example, take the liberal ornamentation in De España vengo. Similar to Kathleen Ferrier's turns in Er, der Herrlichste von allen, but going much further, Lorraine's ornamentation collapses the very distinction between decoration and expression, or between decoration and the melodic line. The ornaments (like so much else in Lorraine's voice and career) come across as tentative and vulnerable and, AT THE SAME TIME, highly virtuosic. That is about as complete a contradiction (and as high a compliment) as I can imagine. Do others hear it this way as well? It reminds me, too, of Ferrier's Du bist die Ruh - where she uses what appears to be the simplest and least artful of a hundred different approaches singers have taken to the climaxes in that song, but what is also emphatically (to me) the most eloquent and powerful. Lorraine's voice has the same qualities of genuineness (artlessness) and interiority (spiritualness) as Ferrier's, but she has in addition to those a mysterious kind of virtuosity. Perhaps it's an appearance of virtuosity? Perhaps it's an appearance of naïveté! That might explain why her Handel, Charpentier, and Rameau are more entrancing than her Bach.

A wonderful concert from The New York Festival of Song featuring Joseph Kaiser and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Marvelous performance preserved in a great CD.

I liked this recording as pleasurable listening, notwithstanding that the singing is not in English except for the last selection (Barcelona, from Sodheim's Company). My two favorite selections were the truly beautiful rendition of La Paloma and the delightful and humorous Barcelona. Since the recording was of a live performance, there is audience applause after a number of the selections, and for me this distracts from the enjoyment of it.