Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinarily Moving Music in Extraordinarily Moving Performances, 13 May 2007
I have rarely been so touched at a deep emotional level as I have been by this collection of five songs written as a passionate gift of love by composer Peter Lieberson for his wife, the mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, a transcendent artist. Everything about the work -- from the outpouring of glorious sound and passion from Ms Lieberson to the texts by Pablo Neruda to the rich sounds of the Boston Symphony under James Levine playing Lieberson's richly romantic music -- adds to the emotional power of the performance. If one then understands that this music was written during a time when Ms Hunt Lieberson was struggling with the cancer that ultimately killed her, that the recording was made not out of desperation but out of hope during one of her periods of modest remission, and that she died not long afterwards, it makes the experience all the more powerful.
One must add that there are two other similarly nonpareil recordings -- eerily enough with singers who were either mezzo-soprano or contralto -- that are classics at least partly because they were made just before the singers died: Jan de Gaetani's recording of her husband's chamber orchestrations of songs by Mahler and Berlioz (including a heartbreaking 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen') and, of course, Kathleen Ferrier's 'Das Lied von der Erde' with the touching dying-away of her last words 'Ewig ... ewig ... ewig'.
One can only hope that Hunt Lieberson, Ferrier and de Gaetani are singing together in Heaven. Ave atque vale.
Scott Morrison
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful farewell, 6 Feb 2007
Even if the music were not so unutterably beautiful, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's vocal performance alone would be enough to make this a five-star recording. As it is, Peter Lieberson's exquisite setting of these five Neruda sonnets serve as an extraordinary vehicle of love and of loss, a ravishing musical love letter from husband to wife. One feels privileged to be party to such a movingly personal and (as pointed out so many times in the press reviews) painfully poignant work.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Is there more to it than meets the ears?, 1 Feb 2007
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.
These, the last lines of the final song that Peter Lieberson wrote for his wife. They are settings of five poems about love by the writer Pablo Neruda. Seemingly they were set in the knowledge that time would be short, but there is nothing sentimental, nothing mawkish. Here is a public declaration, personal and profound of what these two people meant to one another.
I wonder who will sing them now?
They were recorded live in November 05, Levine conducting the Boston SO. They sit alone on the disc, a half hour, valedictory, a swansong.
I really want to like this disc, to grow to love the songs. They are accessable and clearly acknowledge the legacy of Spanish art song. There is melisma, the microtones of Arab influence within Spanish music make appearance. Although the first song opening is reminiscent of Copland's Oboe Concerto, it has a touch of something darker. The orchestration becomes more lush, but never overcomes the singer and the Spanish colour is never merely tourist shorthand.
These are atmospheric songs evoking the imagery of the nature inspired poems. Hunt Lieberson sounds in wonderful voice and she communicates as we hope and expect.
Professional critics have been enthusiastic, perhaps kind. I have listened, I think, six times and I do not recall one sliver of melody. Here is where my disappointment sets in. The music seems not to have anything that loges in the memory as great music does. I wonder, once time has given perspective....will phrases such as, 'profoundly inspiring' and 'among the most sumptuous orchestral songs ever written' seem overcharged?
I am hoping that the hooks within the songs will start to make themselves felt, that they will indeed stand as a worthy legacy from a singer whose work was so foreshortened and whose late work was just showing us what we are now so keenly missing.
MDB
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