Invited to share a secret
New CD captures Lieberson, BSO at a special moment
When the extraordinary mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died this past summer at the age of 52, there was an upwelling of sadness in the classical music world. Beyond her radiant tone and her remarkable musicianship, her performances seemed to have touched the lives of so many people in ways that were deeply personal. In the weeks following her death, concert goers could be heard recounting each time they had seen her perform. Every occasion was an event they had carried with them.
In her final year, a few thousand lucky souls heard her sing "Neruda Songs," a work written for her by her husband, the composer Peter Lieberson, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The piece is a cycle of five sumptuous settings of unabashed love sonnets by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Lieberson premiered "Neruda Songs" in LA and later sang the work in Symphony Hall and on tour with the BSO in New York, Washington , D.C., Philadelphia, and elsewhere. The performances earned raves from critics, but almost no one knew at the time just how sick she was. The tour would be her last appearances with the orchestra.
In the wake of her death in early July, these sublime songs have taken on an expanded sense of meaning as a kind of farewell, a summing up of a life, a valedictory gift. And now there is a recording on its way. On Dec. 19, Nonesuch will release an album of Lieberson singing "Neruda Songs," taken from her performances in Symphony Hall with James Levine and the BSO.
Such a pure and guileless meditation on love tends to confound the critical vocabulary. Indeed, the album feels less like a typical new music disc than a bravely offered glimpse into a private world, less a performance than a disarming invitation to share in a secret. It is easily the most memorable release of the year.
In setting out to write a work on the different aspects of love, Peter Lieberson chose wisely from among the 100 sonnets that Neruda wrote to his wife, Matilde Urrutia. The poems wend their way through a vast range of emotions, from simple gratefulness to a throbbing fear of loss and finally arriving at a kind of peaceful twilight state, a graceful acceptance of the unknown and of the fragility of the things we hold most dear. The exquisite last song begins with the line, "My love, if I die and you don't. . . " Lieberson sings of final thoughts, of a couple giving back its "small infinity," and of a love that will stretch on after death, "like a long river, only changing lands, changing lips."
Peter Lieberson set the Spanish poems brilliantly with music at once capacious and extremely intimate. The composer was trained in the austere 12-tone tradition, but in these songs he leaps for a kind of Straussian lushness spiked with more modern harmonies, making for a language that feels at once old and new. The deep breathing vocal lines were clearly conceived with his wife's voice ringing in his mind; under Levine the orchestra quivers and glows. Lieberson sings with inextinguishable radiance. This is music that makes you forget there is other music.
The singer could achieve that disorienting effect when she performed the works that were most important to her, and in her final years that was the only music she performed. She specialized in Baroque repertoire and in the music of her favorite contemporary composers. As many have observed, she was not a singer who sought to be worship ed on high. Off the stage, she was an intensely private person who shied away from publicity. Even the cause of her death was not immediately disclosed, though it was generally known that she had suffered from breast cancer.
On stage, she transfixed audiences with her ability to distill the extremes of human experience, to imbue her singing with what felt like the pure essence of the emotion at hand -- be it anger, grief, resignation, or love -- and to convey that essence not with the hauteur of a diva but with the generosity of a fellow traveler on a great journey.
I will never forget her performance of a Bach cantata , staged by Peter Sellars with eerie prescience, as the confessions of a hospital patient at the end of life. Supported by Craig Smith and the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music, Lieberson sang in a hospital gown with a single light bulb suspended above her.
Offstage, she had just been through the death of her own sister from cancer, and Bach's music, itself so deeply shadowed by an awareness of life's fragility, seemed to pour out of her with a wisdom and emotional authenticity that left you speechless.
Lieberson grew up in the Bay area of California and later made her home in Santa Fe, but a crucial period of transition in her career took place in Boston. She arrived in the early 1980s not as a singer but as a professional violist, the instrument whose range and tenor most closely approximates the human voice. She freelanced in the orchestra at Emmanuel Music while studying voice at Boston Conservatory. It was a late start for a singing career but also perhaps, as some have speculated, a source of her remarkable maturity.
In a tribute on the radio program Open Source, Smith recalled Lieberson substituting in the viola section of his orchestra during performances of Handel's "Orlando" at the American Repertory Theatre. She was a fine player, Smith recalled, but he was still skeptical when she asked to sing for him. What came out of her mouth that day, Smith said, was raw but astounding. Her control and fluidity would develop soon enough. In a New Yorker profile, Sellars recalled hearing Lieberson in an early audition: "She started singing, and you were in the middle of this raging forest fire."
Lieberson later performed in several of Sellars's maverick stagings of Handel operas in addition to the Bach Cantatas project, which has been released on Nonesuch. During her early years in Boston, she also sang with the Cantata Singers and Boston Lyric Opera, among other groups. She later sang at the Met, making her debut in John Harbison's opera "The Great Gatsby," and with many of the leading conductors and orchestras of the day. Toward the end, her illness forced her to frequently cancel concerts, which made each appearance all the more momentous but at the same time frustrated one of her primary goals as a performer: to disappear completely into the music.
A few weeks ago, in recognition of her deep ties to the local music scene, Emmanuel Church hosted its own highly dignified memorial program. Smith spoke briefly of her presence in the Emmanuel community. The soprano Susan Larson recalled Lieberson's white-hot intensity in her breakout performances of Handel's "Julius Caesar," and also described some of the unique qualities of her voice: the way she could begin a tone from nowhere, or change her timbre to seamlessly blend with different instruments in the orchestra. Richard Dyer, the former classical music critic of The Boston Globe, spoke movingly of the "amber viola glow of her tone," her vital response to text, her generosity as a teacher, and the fact that Boston enjoyed more of her performances than other cities. The composer Harbison recalled her loopy, California conversation style, her love of the music of Heinrich Schütz, and the beautiful completeness of her relationship with her husband . All the speakers leavened their tributes with recollections of her earthy humor, and of her laugh, which Larson described as "something between a bray and a squawk."
And of course there was music. The Lydian String Quartet and cellist Rhonda Rider played the wise and beautiful slow movement from Schubert's C-major Quintet; Smith led the chorus and orchestra in works by Bach and Schütz. The evening ended with an unreleased recording of Lieberson singing with the Emmanuel musicians in a Bach Cantata (BWV 33). The performance took place on the morning of a blizzard in 1995. Smith could not make it to Emmanuel in time to conduct so Harbison, who happened to be in the church that day, stepped up to take his place.
After all the tributes, suddenly, there it was: Lieberson's voice, its ambrosial warmth and emotional generosity no less vivid for the fact this was a humble Bach aria sung in the middle of a blizzard. The verses she sang contained the words, "How fearfully my steps wander, yet Jesus listens to my pleas and shows me to his Father." When the recording stopped, the hall was filled not with applause but with a deep silence. Then the musicians slowly filed out.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com. 