The sound, if not the show, goes on

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has canceled her Tanglewood appearance this summer and her other engagements for 2006, citing personal reasons.

Some compensation arrives in the recent release by Bridge Records of a CD of music by her husband, Peter Lieberson. The disc opens with a performance of his ``Rilke Songs," sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with Peter Serkin at the piano, recorded live at the Ravinia Festival in 2004; it continues with his cello concerto ``The Six Realms" and a Horn Concerto.

Lieberson began the Rilke cycle the summer he met his future wife, in 1997. In 2000 she sang two of the songs in a recital in London's Wigmore Hall that was recorded and released by the BBC. By the time he completed the cycle it had grown to encompass five songs.

Peter Lieberson's mother, the late dancer and actress Vera Zorina, to whom this album is dedicated, spoke German fluently and Rilke was her favorite poet, so the composer grew up with some of these texts.

Another influence on the songs -- and indeed in all the music he has composed since 1997 -- was the singing of his wife. When she participated in the premiere of his opera ``Ashoka's Dream" in Santa Fe, Lieberson writes in the album booklet, he ``became more and more aware of the significance of melodic line and what a great performer can do to invest it with meaning and integrity. . . . When I heard Lorraine sing one of her arias . . . the power of the melodic line truly dawned on me, and began to gain supremacy in my musical thinking."

The composer's earlier music was always infused with a spiritual dimension; it was intellectually challenging and emotionally powerful, as well as vividly pictorial and dramatic. But recent years have brought a new warmth, a new depth, and an accessibility that does not compromise complex ideas, craftsmanship , and feelings.

The songs consequently continue the opulent late-Romantic melodic tradition of Mahler and Richard Strauss while speaking in Lieberson's own more contemporary musical language , which is strong, subtle, and supple. The settings are at once intellectual and intuitive, elusive but also very much present in the here-and-now. They also accumulate a collective impact that makes them a cycle and not just a group of songs.

No musical performance can be safely called definitive, because it is music's nature always to offer other possibilities. But Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Serkin operate on a comprehensive level of artistry.

Peter Lieberson wrote ``The Six Realms" for cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Project. For contractual and budgetary reasons, the recording was made in Denmark with the Odense Symphony Orchestra and with the excellent Czech cellist Michaela Fukacova as soloist instead of Ma, and with Justin Brown conducting.

The six realms in question come from the cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism (the God realm, the jealous God realm, human realm, the animal realm, the hell realm, the hungry ghost realm ). Collectively, Lieberson writes in his note, they present ``a highly detailed portrait of our human consciousness." Each of the realms is also characterized by an emotion. Lieberson characterizes each of them, and the sorrow of the world, with abundance of lustrous, expressive melody borne on vivid harmonies and writing that spans the whole range of the orchestra from piccolo to tuba.

The Horn Concerto, also recorded in Odense by the formidable virtuoso hornist William Purvis with New England Conservatory's Donald Palma conducting, highlights the familiar noble capacities of the horn, as well as the cut-up side in which Richard Strauss reveled in ``Till Eulenspiegel." It adds up to a complex, richly human work that continuously springs engaging surprises.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's engagements to sing in Poulenc's ``The Dialogues of the Carmelites" at the Chicago Lyric Opera and Orfeo in a new production of Gluck's ``Orfeo ed Euridice" staged by choreographer Mark Morris at the Metropolitan Opera in 2007 so far remain in place.

And she continues to inspire her husband's music. A new cantata ``The World in Flower," commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and written for her and baritone Gerald Finley, was postponed in May when the music wasn't finished in time. But she sang his most recent completed work, ``Neruda Songs," with three major orchestras and she toured it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra earlier this year. Hopes are alive in Symphony Hall that before long it will be possible to arrange to release one of her performances of the songs with the BSO under James Levine. They are his most accomplished and emotionally penetrating music to date, as well as love songs for the singer.