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TRIBUTE
July 11, 2006
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By Anna Carol Dudley, Nicholas McGegan, Mickey Butts, and Barbara Stack
On July 3, famed mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, a Bay Area native, died of cancer. People from different periods of her career have offered San Francisco Classical Voice their memories of this renowned yet unpretentious artist, whose passing is mourned by musicians and audience members alike.
For those of us who followed Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's extraordinary career from the beginning, the news of her death last week was devastating. Some years ago, she put her singing career largely on hold in order to be with her sister, who died of cancer. At about the same time, she learned that she herself had to undergo cancer treatment. After a hiatus of about six months last year, she started performing again, but a series of cancellations made her friends increasingly concerned that she was losing her battle with the disease. Now we know the sad result. Lorrie Hunt grew up in the East Bay, studied voice and viola at San Jose State University, and began her professional career as a violist. I first met her in the 1970s, when I was singing a lot of new music and she was an adventurous freelance violist. She was part of an ensemble with which I recorded songs by Luigi Dallapiccola. Years later, she burst upon the Bay Area early-music scene as a soprano soloist with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Her breath had replaced her bow. When I went backstage to congratulate her after her performance of Handel's Susanna, she graciously told me that she was nervous about my being in the audience because of my having done the same role at UC Berkeley — a lovely example of her generous, unpretentious nature. She immediately became one of Philharmonia's all-time favorite soloists, as audiences responded to her emotional penetration of Handel's music and her technical command of Baroque coloratura. She took her place in a history going back to famous singers of Handel's time, admired for her thorough command of harmony, rhetoric, and improvisation, and loved for her heartfelt, moving performances. After several years of increasing success as a soprano, she re-emerged as a mezzo-soprano. She had not sounded comfortable singing soprano in a Philharmonia Messiah, and the change to mezzo-soprano repertoire was a revelation. Her voice bloomed, taking on rich color. Because of her thorough musical and vocal grounding and her mastery of language and theater, Hunt Lieberson excelled in a variety of musical styles, avoiding being pigeonholed in any. Her distinctive, moving voice and her great heart were engaged in a wonderful variety of repertoires. San Francisco Opera brought her powerful performance as Ottavia in Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea to Bay Area audiences in 1998, and she was interested in new and rarely performed repertoire as well. She sang with distinction in John Adams' El Niño when it premiered in 2000 in Davies Hall under Kent Nagano, and she did Debussy's Mélisande with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall in April of 2001, already in the shadow of death, she sang songs by her husband, Peter Lieberson, along with Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben. Her last public performances, in March, were of her husband's love songs, written for her — his Neruda Songs. Her repertoire was more extensive than this. She performed with major conductors and orchestras in prestigious concert halls and opera houses throughout the United States and Europe, drawing rave reviews for her performances and recordings wherever she went. She did it all — recitals, chamber music, oratorio, and opera — drawing from four wonderful centuries of music, and the beginning of a fifth. A list, even incomplete, of the composers whose works she sang gives an idea of the extent of her interest and ability: Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Purcell, Charpentier, Rameau, Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Bizet, Elgar, Mahler, Berlioz, Massenet, Poulenc, Britten, Berg, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Harbison, Adams, Saariaho, Lieberson. She worked with Peter Sellars in staged productions of works by Bach, Handel, and Mozart, including a riveting performance of Bach's end-of-life Cantata No. 82, Ich habe genug (I have enough; I am ready to die). Her performances of Sellars' productions were physically, emotionally, and theatrically powerful, her whole spirit and body inhabiting the music. Her having to withdraw from the San Francisco Opera premiere of John Adams' Dr. Atomic last year was a particular disappointment, because she might have helped to give a unique depth to the difficult role of Kitty Oppenheimer, written for her. I have discovered through the magic of Google that fans in Boston think she began her singing career there. Actually, she began it here; when the Berkeley Symphony was preparing a performance of Hansel and Gretel for a captive audience in San Quentin, she spoke up from the viola section, offering to sing Hansel. The rest is history. We are willing to share her with Boston, but we know where she came from, and we were always happy to welcome her back to the Bay Area. (A.C.D.)
I first met Lorraine and heard her sing in the Handel Festival on the SUNY-Purchase campus in upstate New York in 1985. She sang the role of Sesto in the premiere of Peter Sellar's production of Handel's Giulio Cesare. It was obvious that she was an absolute star from the moment she came on stage. I remember especially the duet with Cornelia at the end of the First Act. Aside from the wondrous beauty of her voice, there was an intensity of emotion that I have almost never heard from any other singer before or since. Instantly, she became the true star of the show. The next year, we worked together on a production of Handel's Saul in San Antonio, Texas. We both hugely enjoyed the slightly raffish atmosphere of the place and even danced the cha-cha together at a party. We lost our "Messiah virginity" together, with the St. Louis Symphony in 1986. It was wonderful to watch an orchestra become totally transfixed by her artistry. It is still one of the performances of the piece that I treasure most fondly. For some seven years starting in about 1988, Lorraine sang almost every season with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and, as one might expect, she was always the highlight. We performed several Handel oratorios, including Susanna, Messiah, and Theodora. Her singing of the title role in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas was so moving that the entire audience was reduced to tears by the end of the Lament. Luckily, many of these performances were recorded, some of them live. Nothing can ever beat the experience of actually being present while she sang, but listening to the CDs is still moving, especially knowing that we will hear her no more in the concert hall. Many of the roles she sang contained much sad music, but the process of rehearsing and recording with her was always filled with joy. She had a tremendous sense of humor and was fond of a good story and a hearty laugh. I feel lucky to have known her, to have been her friend, and to have been beside her while she sang so gloriously. (N.M.)
When I learned of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's passing, I reflected a few moments on my deep sadness at this too-early loss, and then Mary VanClay and I immediately set about planning a way to remember her. The result is this tribute from several Bay Area musical figures who knew and worked with her. (We will publish any further recollections from fans and colleagues alike in the next issue of SFCV.) The second thing I did was to put on a recording of her collected Handel arias that the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra released in 1994 on Harmonia Mundi. The collection includes a number of her most shining moments with Philharmonia over the years, including remarkably pure and moving interpretations of arias from a huge range of Handel oratorios. No matter how many times I hear these songs, I never tire of them. Like many others, I have had my own momentary brush with her great artistry. From the chorus in a 1995 Berkeley Symphony Orchestra performance of Brahms' Alto Rhapsody at Zellerbach Hall, I'm sure I wasn't alone among the other men of the UC Chorus in feeling like I was personally locked in my own private duet with the gracious and humble Lorraine Hunt, as she was then known. Hunt Lieberson had that magical and too-rare ability to cause the rest of the world to fall away when she sang, leaving only her voice, deeply rooted as it was to her physical being, to her powerful spirit, even to the earth beneath her feet. And now we only have that voice on recordings, and in our fleeting memories. (M.B.)
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, then known as Lorrie Hunt, was a member of Oakland Youth Orchestra, then known as Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra, from 1969 to 1972, under the batons of Robert Hughes and Denis deCoteau. She was a graduate of Berkeley High School. Her experiences with the orchestra included performances as both a violist and a vocal soloist. A review by Charles Shere in the Oakland Tribune, April 17, 1972, hints at what was to come:
The Oakland Youth orchestra showed its stuff last night in an almost frightening display of competence and musicianship. At many points along the tiring two-hour-plus concert the sound was thoroughly professional.The friends Lorrie made during those years, especially those with whom she toured to the Herbert von Karajan International Festival in Berlin in 1972 under deCoteau, now number many successful conductors and instrumentalists. They were always heartened by one another's successes and warmed by the many strong and amusing personalities among the group — and now they are absolutely devastated by Hunt Lieberson's untimely passing. The institution of the youth orchestra is still the delight and savior of many a talented teenager, and current and past members of Oakland Youth Orchestra can take pride in this community as we mourn the passing of one of our own. (B.S.)
(Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculty of UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University lecturer emerita, and director emerita of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop. Nic McGegan has just celebrated his 20th year as music director of the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO). Since 1990, he has also been artistic director of Germany's International Handel Festival in Göttingen. This year he was made an honorary professor at the School of Music at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. Mickey Butts is executive director and publisher of San Francisco Classical Voice. His writing has appeared in Salon, Food & Wine, The Industry Standard, Wired, Parenting, Sunset, The Nation, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Barbara Stack is executive director of the Oakland Youth Symphony.)
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Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (Dido)