Nonesuch
2006
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Sings Peter Lieberson 'Neruda Songs'
About This Album
The history of Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs is so freighted with emotion that it's difficult to listen to them with any objectivity. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote 100 Love Sonnets (1960) for Matilde Urrutia, who later became his wife, and Peter Lieberson set five of them for his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Lieberson's settings grew out of a full understanding of his wife's extraordinary vocal and dramatic gifts and are suffused with his intimate awareness of her personal and artistic vitality, as well as the fragility of her physical health. Hunt Lieberson gave the premiere of the Neruda Songs in Los Angeles in May 2005 and recorded them with the Boston Symphony under James Levine in November that year. She died in July 2006. The listener is always aware of the generosity of the husband and wife, composer and singer, in being allowed to participate in the intimacy of their final love song to each other.

Lieberson's musical style, which since the beginning of his relationship with Hunt Lieberson had broadened to incorporate a richer harmonic vocabulary along with a heightened awareness of the importance of melody, reaches a new level of lyric and dramatic intensity in these songs.
Track List

Neruda Songs, For Mezzo-soprano & Orchestra
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