Lorraine Hunt Lieberson; "Von ewiger Liebe"; Johannes Brahms

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson---mezzo-soprano
Peter Serkin---piano
2004
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Awards and reviews
BBC Music MagazineMarch 2009
Peter Serkin brings special qualities to the Brahms group… while his delicacy in Debussy's Trois Chansons de Bilitis is magical. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson equals him in her musical insight and in her complete security of approach to her own instrument. Her huge potential range of dynamics allows her to shape each song individually, while her poised understating of Pierre Louÿ's Debussyan texts makes them infinitely suggestive.
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Gramophone MagazineJuly 2009
She truly was one of the great singers of our time… what we hear now reaffirms it. The performance of the Lucretia cantata alone would be sufficient. …Hunt Lieberson brings nobility to the full range of emotions and … an extraordinary sense of identifications with the suffering woman. The voice itself was a noble instrument: warm, full-bodied and seamless in its passage over the vocal registers.
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The Observer5th April 2009
The American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson gave this recital two years before she died in 2006. It shows this revered artist at her ardent and emotional best. She always prized the spontaneity of live performance above all and this CD captures her vitality and warmth, and her audible rapport with an audience.
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The Telegraph7th April 2009This heart-rending recording commemorates one of the few truly great singers of
our time – the American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson who died from breast cancer in 2006 at the age of 52. Like Kathleen Ferrier, whose fate she shared, Hunt Lieberson's voice has a distinctive
viola-ish timbre which made it peculiarly suited to the expression of deep and melancholy emotion. In this overwhelmingly intense live recital, sensitively accompanied by Peter Serkin, she sings Brahms and
Mozart lieder, Handel's dramatic cantata Lucrezia, Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis, and an almost unbearably moving account of the spiritual Deep River. It's hard to listen without weeping.