Neruda Songs
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Nonesuch
The American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died last summer at the age of 52, had a light inside her. It flashed from her eyes whenever she walked on stage, and it brightened and warmed every word she sang in oratorios by Bach or operas by Handel, Rameau and Berlioz; it left you aglow long afterwards. She was a muse to her husband, the composer Peter Lieberson, whose last tribute to her was an orchestral setting of five sonnets by Pablo Neruda. She sang the work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Levine, at a concert a few months before her death. This disc commemorates that event, in a performance that is at once breathtakingly lovely and almost unbearably poignant.
The loved one in Neruda's poems metaphorically merges with the world. She is a moon, a blazing blue sky, a seed disseminated by the wind. Lieberson's instrumentation brilliantly matches all these verbal images, with a tropical undergrowth of writhing strings, ecstatic upward runs on a piano, and the excited dynamism of marimbas. The singer's voice wails with unappeased desire, soars in elation, then plunges into a cradling, earth-motherly tenderness: the performance is as intimate as an anatomy lesson. The last song confronts death and its wrenching apart of lovers. But the vocal line, faintly and almost posthumously repeating the word "amor" at the very end, remains radiant with joy and hope, refusing to mourn.
This cycle deserves to acquire classic status, like Robert Schumann's Frauenliebe und leben or Wagner's Wesendonck-Lieder. Only one thing can hold it back: I suspect it will be a long time before any other singer dares to risk comparison with its first, unforgotten, irreplaceable interpreter.
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