Lorraine Hunt Lieberson 1954-2006
Nobody who heard the voice of the American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who has died aged 52 of cancer, remained unaffected. She had an extraordinary capacity for emotional connection, such that her performances seemed to penetrate the very marrow of those fortunate enough to witness them. Inextricable from the passion she brought to her music was an incomparable beauty of phrasing, a matchless, velvety tone and a quality, barely definable, of rapture. Her artistic powers were still in full and glorious flow; she was one of the greatest mezzos of our age. A woman of immense grace, she was disarming in her candour and warmth.
The Guardian, 07/06/06
When Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang, time itself stopped to listen.
Richard Dyer, Boston Globe
When I heard yesterday morning that Lorraine had died, almost a week ago, my heart fell to the floor, and I couldn't breathe for a minute or two. We were friends for a short time in Boston, in the 80s, when she was just beginning her ascent. I first heard her sing at Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street, where Craig Smith conducted a performance of a Bach cantata each Sunday morning. It was the first of many times I sat rapt, transfixed and enveloped by the astonishing beauty of her sound, that radiant and powerful voice.
Some random memories - her laugh. It was lusty and LOUD. So loud, that roomsful of heads would swivel to see the woman who could be so unrestrained. She made a mean raspberry tart. She brought me a chunk of the fallen Berlin wall.
She liked to tell a story, for instance, about her first operatic appearance, in a 1979 performance of Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel" that Kent Nagano led for inmates at San Quentin. She played Hansel, made up in a boy's costume, and as she was leaving the prison, in her feminine street clothes, she heard an inmate exclaim, "You mean that was a chick? S -- , I thought it was just a dude with a big ass!" And then she would let loose the throaty, Rabelaisian cackle that served as her laugh.
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
I knew she'd been ill. She survived a struggle with breast cancer several years ago, but she was overtaken, finally. Too young, at the height of her powers, in full flower.
I'm finding it very difficult to put into words the totality of LHL. The quality of her voice, her instrument, and her artistic integrity were unparalleled. She was fearless, nakedly honest and her voice was directly connected to her heart, but controlled by a discriminating and expressive musical mind. She was incandescent on stage, and emotionally wide open, so much so that you felt sometimes like a voyeur. But in the end, you walked away stunned into feeling more human and connected to the universe than you did coming in.
Though her work seldom drew less than raves from critics, her singing eluded description. Despite the gleaming richness of her sound, her voice somehow conveyed poignant intimacy. Although she paid scrupulous attention to rhythm, phrasing and text, she came across as utterly spontaneous. Her person disappeared into her performances. And yet in a Handel aria, a Britten cantata or a song by her husband, she could be so revealing you sometimes wanted to avert your eyes for fear of intruding.
Anthony Tommasini, NY Times
That was her gift to us, and it hurts that she's lost to the world now.
I'm no good really, at this writing thing - I think I'll just close with a few more paragraphs from some tributes that I found.
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died often, and exceedingly, devastatingly well. As an opera singer, she was expected to do no less.
But Hunt Lieberson was no ordinary singer. And her deaths onstage were anything but ordinary. They were fantastically fearless. Her dying was not melodramatic, not sentimental, not even tearful, but shattering in a near shamanistic way. And she achieved this by being the most alive singer I have ever witnessed.
Death, she reminded us time and again, was not to be feared, not if you understood it as the thing that makes life meaningful. Come to terms with it and every waking minute matters. In her case, she made every note she sang, and every word, matter to the utmost.
Sunday night, Hunt Lieberson succumbed at age 52, presumably to breast cancer. She kept the details of her illness to herself, not wanting to inject any sentimentality into her work. Her art was not about her but about us, about transcending the ego in music and reaching for universal truths.
Mark Swed, LA Times
In the very best of times, this loss would be a terrible one, especially the loss of one at her artistic zenith and at such a comparatively young age. In the world of today, when unconscionable cruelties are defended in the debased name of "patriotism" and life itself is defiled and destroyed -- even when the particular lives in question were those of people who never did us the slightest harm -- the loss is almost unbearable. In a world that diminishes our humanity with each day that passes, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson added to our worth, and she brought beauty that no one else had conceived into our midst.
Arthur Silber
Her passing brings to mind lots of clichés about treasuring what you have and the uncertainty of life and daring to take an untrod path but these things are clichés because they are so true that all their edges have been worn off and they are as undistinguishable to the casual eye as pebbles worn down by the sea. But if Lorraine Hunt Lieberson were here to sing them to you, you would know that they are true.
Patrick Vaz
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's voice was soaring over my head...literally, three feet above me. It was on fire with the intensity of ten suns, summoned by the passion of John Adams' La Anunciacion from El Nino. For five performances, I was utterly transfixed by the incredible beauty of the sound and it was all I could do to concentrate and keep playing.
I'll never have that chance again...
Paul Viapiaono - Guitarist
I always loved hearing Hunt Lieberson sing, but I hated writing about her performances. More than with any other artist, her splendor seemed to defy description or accurate measure.
Words failed; superlatives bounced off her performances with an empty clang. You'd have to have been John Keats to convey any sense of the beauty she brought into the world.
After hearing of her death, I went to put on my old CD of "Theodora," made when she was still a soprano and singing the title role. Coincidentally, I had just finished reading L.P. Hartley's ravishing novel "The Go-Between," which includes a scene in which the adolescent protagonist dazzles a roomful of listeners with a rendition of Theodora's aria "Angels, ever bright and fair."
I needed to hear that music once again, sung as only Hunt Lieberson could do it, with lofty, poignant phrasing and a sumptuously lyrical touch. And it had its effect. Angels, ever bright and fair: Take, O take her to your care.
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle