Robert Carl: Fanfare Reviews

Some of my most satisfying work in recent years has been the reviewing of new music CDs for Fanfare magazine. Every six months, I'm including a review of a disc which has really excited me. And because Fanfare has a roughly 4 month cycle from assignment to publication, you may even be seeing this before it comes out. I'd like to add that I've found Fanfare to be an usually good source of information on new music, independent of my role in it. The critics have a great deal of freedom to develop their thoughts at leisure, so often a review can become an essay which touches on a wider range of issues. You can subscribe at:

Issues come out every two months. You can also see selected reviews at Fanfare.com. The following review comes from Fanfare 30:5, May June 2007:

LIEBERSON Neruda Songs. James Levine, cond.; Boston SO; Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (mez). NONESUCH 79954-2 (31:51) 

   Don’t be put off by the relatively short length of this disc; Nonesuch has given all of us a great gift by rushing this recording to release.
   This work comes freighted with a deeply tragic “backstory”, and though I’d like to just talk about the music, one simply can’t here, since the history behind the work is so compelling and essential to its reception.
   Composer Peter Lieberson (b.1949) and the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt met in 1997 during the production of the former’s opera Ashoka’s Dream, fell in love, and eventually were married. (It was also quite dramatic, as he was already married at the time of the encounter.) They went on to become one of the most prominent couples in the world of classical music. He is the son of Goddard Lieberson (president of Columbia Records in its glory days), taught at Harvard, and became one of the most prominent composers of the uptown modernist school, a “next generation” to keep that flame alive. She, while originally trained as a violist, emerged relatively late in life as one of the great singers of her generation, possessed of an extraordinary instrument, equal musical intelligence, and a fearless aesthetic temperament. Her major concentrations became early and new music.
   And she was also ill with cancer, which claimed her life in June of 2006. I reviewed an earlier collaboration of the two, his Rilke Songs, for mezzo and piano, in Fanfare 30:2, which I found very satisfying. But now a much more substantial cycle appears, the Neruda Songs for mezzo and orchestra. This work is the great collaboration the two obviously were meant to realize. It was premiered in 2005, and indeed concert reviews at the time spoke of how, after years of on-and-off appearances and rumors about her health, Ms. Lieberson seemed radiant and in better voice than ever. There was a sort of collective sigh of relief that the worst appeared to be over. But it was an illusion. As it turns out this work was truly her swan song. And as such, through his writing and her singing, it is a deep and overwhelming testament of mutual love, written with the knowledge of impending death.
   That covers the personal. What about the music itself? It’s ravishing. Lieberson has grown ever more warm and sensual in his writing over the years, and there’s much greater openness of spirit in his music, obviously a function of his relationship with his wife, and also of his practice of Tibetan Buddhism. The harmonic language, and the general sound of the music, touches on the practice of such as Strauss, Wolf, and Mahler. But unlike a lot of “Re-Romantic” knockoffs that have crowded stages over the last couple of decades, this music sounds familiar, natural, even rather timeless, but also doesn’t quote or plagiarize at all. The harmonic voicings and progressions feel as though they have come through the fire of high chromaticism (or atonality if you like), and are all the more meaningful for the composer’s long journey back to them. In short, they sound deeply considered, and fresh. There’s a deep engagement and probity throughout the work, the motives are memorable, harmonic sequences are often lushly beautiful, and everything sounds necessary, deeply considered, right.
   The texts are five of Pablo Neruda’s love sonnets (of which there are a total of 100), sung in Spanish. These are some of the most rhapsodic and ecstatic love poems of the 20th century. Lieberson is not afraid to repeat lines or phrases, and goes even further, returning to earlier lines, thus creating strophic structures that didn’t exist in the original text. It’s definitely an interpretation, and some textual purists may be offended, but it makes all the sense in the world, enhancing meaning and following the music’s logic. My own opinion is that any composer worth his/her salt should be free to alter song texts to fit the musical need, the way a film director will adapt a novel’s storyline to the screenplay. If I have any small reservation, it is that I’m not sure how necessary the musical “Latinisms” are, i.e. the evocations of Spanish idioms, such as the castanets of the fourth movement. But they are always subtle and expertly crafted, and I suspect they ultimately add to the natural flow of the music, and to the identity of text and music (at least as a creative stimulus to the composer).
   Hunt Lieberson’s singing beggars description. Her low register is unearthly, especially in the middle song, “Don’t go far off, even for a day, because—“. The final song, “My love, if I die and you don’t—“ (again, such prescience of impending events) is a leave-taking that evokes and even rivals Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde. Levine’s BSO is completely in tune with the soloist, reflecting his infinite operatic experience. This is a live performance (thank heavens there were no scruples about releasing it in lieu of a studio version, which of course will never exist with this singer), and the sound is perfectly fine, the audience noise almost imperceptible.
   The genre of orchestral song cycle is one I’ve not noted with much frequency in recent years (not just in new music, but concert programming as well), but this piece may help to revive its fortunes. At this point, it feels almost unseemly to critique music that comes from personal circumstances, which are so raw and recent. And for the same reason, I think one can’t yet rush too soon to ultimate judgment. One critical test in the future will be how the piece fares with different singers. But I can say with confidence that it will have future performances. The piece is old-fashioned “Beautiful”, with the sound of a repertoire-item imprinted on it from the outset, yet without a hint of the self-conscious smugness that such an approach sometimes brings. Suffice it to say, this is one of the most important releases of the year, not just of new music, not even just of classical music. An immediate must for any music-lover.

                                     Robert Carl