Lorraine Hunt Lieberson - Neruda Songs

Classical not your gig? I tearfully direct sceptics to tracks 5 and 4, though I think they're all brilliant. Each composition is adapted from the love poems of Pablo Neruda by the composer Peter Lieberson, who created these settings for his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

Been driving all night / my hand's wet on the wheel. The first time I heard these (played by some Indianapolis public radio station as we were driving back from West Virginia to Chicago at 2am), I was stunned out of my listless drivezone. Even eM, drowsing at my side, awoke to ask, what is this?

Death giveth back. The arrangements are modern yet classical, beautiful though brutish, restrained but powerful, dramatically understated. And Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's voice is just so achingly effing poignant. Makes it hard to forget the fact that she knew she was dying when she sang these.

"Lieberson's orchestral writing is both opulent and sensual, highly selective and invariably effective in its use of colour...Each of the five settings is distinctive, while as a unified work the piece works brilliantly. Lieberson has here turned something deeply personal into something of much wider significance. The cycle deserves many more performances." George Hall, BBC Music Magazine, 01/02/2007

"Inevitably, these are deeply personal as well as public utterances, and in this sense, Lieberson's 'cycle' of five sonnet settings have a Mahlerian impact on the listener, a sense of being witness to something essentially intimate, almost an invasion of privacy...These are, indeed, life-enhancing, uplifting songs, rejoicing in the joys and passions of a love that death cannot destroy. Lieberson wrote memorably singable lines for his wife's unique voice, and his orchestrations are rich and inventive, evoking the sultry, hot-house atmosphere of Latin-American ardour." Hugh Canning, International Record Review, 01/02/2007

Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs — a setting of five love poems on deep and wrenching subjects such as passing delight, memory, fear of separation and transcendence beyond death — is one of the most extraordinary affecting artistic gifts ever created by one lover to another... The score is achingly lovely, a genuine mixture of modernism and romanticism that has been sumptuously orchestrated and charged with the same appreciative ripeness that pervades Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs... I hope the Neruda Songs are recorded, for they are just as universal as they are shatteringly personal. Tim Page, Washington Post, 01/03/2006

link to the above reviews and more here

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