July 3 is the first anniversary of the death of mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the most transcendent singer I have had the privilege to hear. Her performances in Handel operas were unforgettable; her renditions of Bach were perfection itself. Now, on Youtube you can see some snippets of her greatness:
Handel, Theodora, As with rosy steps the morn advancing drives the shades of night
And for contrast Handel, Giulio Cesare, Svegliatevi nel core .
You can see here how Lorraine rises above the trendy direction and gives a performance of great purity and how credible she is as a teenage Sesto.
This is the hommage written last year by Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker.
Handel, Theodora, As with rosy steps the morn advancing drives the shades of night
And for contrast Handel, Giulio Cesare, Svegliatevi nel core .
You can see here how Lorraine rises above the trendy direction and gives a performance of great purity and how credible she is as a teenage Sesto.
This is the hommage written last year by Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker.
Quote:As a side note: The Neruda Songs were co-commissioned by a Jewish friend whose wife, shortly after her diagnosis with advanced lung cancer, joined me on a trip to Rome in 2001 where she was blessed by Pope John Paul II at a general audience. She has made a full recovery and was present at the premiere of the Songs. Needless to say, the evening was drainingly emotional.
On the day before the Fourth of July, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died of complications from breast cancer, at the age of fifty-two. News of her passing aroused little interest outside the classical-music world, since she was hardly a household name, and lacked even the intermittently twinkling, Sunday-morning-television stardom achieved by the likes of Rene Fleming and Yo-Yo Ma. She recorded infrequently in later years; she was shy about being interviewed; she had no press agent. Her fame consisted of an ever-widening swath of ardor and awe that she left in her wake whenever she sang. Among those who had been strongly affected by her work, there was a peculiarly intense kind of grief.
I was one of those people. In recent years, I found it hard to assume a pose of critical distance from this artist, even though I never got closer to her than Row H. In the days after she died, I tried to write about her, and failed. It felt wrong to call her great and extraordinary, or to throw around diva-worship words like goddess and immortal, because those words placed her on a pedestal, whereas the warmth in her voice always brought her close. Nonetheless, empty superlatives will have to do. She was the most remarkable singer I ever heard. She was incapable of giving a routine performanceI saw her twelve times, and each appearance had something explosively distinctive about itand her career took the form of a continuous ascent. New Yorkers saw her for the final time last November, when she came to town with the Boston Symphony to perform Neruda Songs, composed by her husband, Peter Lieberson. She sang that night with such undiminished power that it seemed as though she would be around forever. Then she was gone, leaving the apex vacant.
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