Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings Peter Lieberson 'Neruda Songs'
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Free Music Notes for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings Peter Lieberson 'Neruda Songs'
Free Music Review: A Stunningly Beautiful and Meaningful Farewell/Adios
Hit: 5 Stars
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
Free Music Review: Sumptuous poetry
Hit: 5 Stars
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
Free Music Review: Brilliant, moving homage
Hit: 5 Stars
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!Free Music Review: The Song Cycle of the Century
Hit: 5 Stars
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.
Free Music Review: An exquisite Liebestod
Hit: 5 Stars
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.