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Touching the heart
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Peter Serkin melt the ice
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

"Toccami quà" — "Touch me here" — Mozart’s peasant bride sings, pointing to her heart, offering her new husband a balm for the wounds he’s received from Don Giovanni. This was the heavenly/sexy conclusion of the final encore sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, to the heavenly/sexy accompaniment of pianist Peter Serkin, in their December 7 FleetBoston Celebrity Series recital at Jordan Hall. And the heart is just where those souls who braved the cold, the shoulder-high mounds of snow, the ankle-deep slush, and the slow subway and bus rides to hear these beloved artists had been touched all afternoon. This was surely the most eagerly awaited recital of the season, and though close to a quarter of the ticket holders couldn’t make it, those who did were grateful that it wasn’t cancelled and thoroughly rewarded for their efforts. A couple of days later, the rewards continued when Lieberson, this time with her husband, composer Peter Lieberson, appeared for an illuminating public discussion and master class sponsored by Harvard’s Music Department and Office for the Arts.

The concert was full of surprises. The performers made their entrance, then Lieberson seemed to be centering herself, going into a kind of trance, a long moment of silence, before her glorious voice and smile slowly filled the hall like a soft hand filling a glove, or a tender caress taking everyone into its embrace. "Unbewegte laue Luft" — "Motionless balmy air" — is how Brahms’s love song begins; but that "deep calm of nature" hides a breast swelling and veins rushing with "more ardent desires." At the turning point, Lieberson broke the stillness with a swell of intense, importunate desire, and Serkin’s held-back trills overflowed into passionate fullness. What a way to bring a tired and chilled audience into the world of music! Two other Brahms songs followed: the exquisitely erotic lullaby "Ruhe, Süßliebchen" ("Rest, My Sweet Love"), with its rockaby piano and its rising refrain, "Schlafe, schlaf ein" ("Sleep, go to sleep"), floating upward, then falling like a breath; and the fervent dialogue of plighted troth, "Von ewiger Liebe" ("Of Eternal Love").

Lieberson is probably the world’s greatest living Handel interpreter, so he wasn’t far behind, with a recitative and aria from the cantata La Lucrezia: first the noble Roman matron’s curse against her rapist, in which the last word of the line "May the air he breathes become infected" ("infetti") sails off into volleys of flamboyant coloratura, which Lieberson turned into an incantation of outrage (later, in the repeat section, she began rocking back and forth from one foot to the other); then Lucrezia’s suicide aria, which Lieberson began in a voice almost completely drained of color. Her dark low tones (not just growls) were as impressive as her glittering high notes. And Serkin made the orchestral reduction sound as if it had been written for the piano.

The first half ended with Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis, his setting of three Pierre Louÿs poems about a young girl’s encounter with the demigod Pan. Serkin’s delicate and eerie rippling provided the atmosphere Lieberson was breathing. In "Pan’s Flute," you could hear the voice of innocence suddenly made aware of guilty pleasure ("My mother will never believe that I have spent such a long time searching for my lost belt"). In the second song, "Le chevelure" ("The Hair"), the girl relates the erotic dream Pan has confided to her about how her long hair has bound them together in rapture. The last word of the song is "frisson" (which should be translated only as "frisson"). After the final, hushed piano chord, Lieberson opened her mouth in an unspoken "O." The last song is "The Tomb of the Naiads," the most mysterious of the three, in which Pan speaks to her chillingly of the death of the Satyrs — "the Satyrs and the Nymphs as well."

At Tanglewood last summer, these Debussy songs were staged by countertenor/director Drew Minter. Lieberson was, I’ve been told, barefoot, and Minter, costumed as Pan, circled her as she sang. Minter was having shoulder surgery and couldn’t appear in Boston; I’m sorry I missed the Tanglewood event. But Lieberson’s performance, yet another glimpse of her incomparable understanding of Debussy’s stylistic half-light after her astounding performance of Mélisande in this fall’s BSO concert version of Pelléas et Mélisande, was entirely, magically self-sufficient. You could "see" in her voice, in her look, what she heard the piano depicting.

Five years ago at Jordan Hall, Lieberson sang two songs written for her by her husband — settings of two of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. There are now five settings, under the title Rilke Songs, completed in 2001. This was the Boston premiere. Peter Serkin has been a life-long friend of Peter Lieberson (20 years ago he played the premiere of Lieberson’s First Piano Concerto with the BSO), so these songs take full advantage of the extended range of two performers the composer knows and loves deeply. The poems are about the possibility of transformation, and they’re written in a language that is abstract yet powerfully emotional. The settings are a sort of sinuous, hypnotic recitative, a musical continuum that includes great outbursts and telling silences, the performers interacting in a spectrum of nuance. At the Harvard discussion, Peter Lieberson called the poems "heart language." The Celebrity Series program didn’t include Lieberson’s program note, which might have helped make this complex cycle a little easier to absorb on a first hearing. I couldn’t put it all together yet. Now I need to — want to — hear these songs again. (Rilke Songs has been recorded by Bridge Records, with Lieberson and Serkin, but no one knew when it would be released.) "Lorraine can do anything," the composer exclaimed at Harvard. "I wouldn’t say that," the singer countered. "I wouldn’t want you to put a high C in."

The program ended with another group of unusual items — three songs (one in French, two in German) and a late Masonic cantata by Mozart. The songs are often performed — when they’re performed at all — as charming throwaways. But with Lieberson and Serkin, "Dans un bois solitaire" ("In a Lonely Wood") became a dark comedy about awakening love ("Love wakens easily," the singer admits when he rouses an irritable Cupid from a deep sleep). Serkin’s thunderous rumblings made "When Louisa burns her faithless lover’s letters" sound like something out of Don Giovanni, and Lieberson, who sang the betrayed Donna Elvira in the Peter Sellars/Craig Smith Don Giovanni, brought to this song that character’s impulse at self-dramatizing. "Abendempfindung" ("Evening Thoughts") is one of Mozart’s best songs, and Lieberson and Serkin conveyed its deep sense of wonder at the passing of life.

Oddest of all was the cantata, Die ihr des unermeßlichen Weltalls Schöpfer ehrt ("You who honor the Creator of the Infinite Universe"), K.619, written at the same time as Die Zauberflöte and just after the beloved choral motet Ave verum corpus. The opening grand piano fanfare was followed by a grand ecumenical vocal exhortation to listen to the trumpet of the "Lord of All," whether he be called "Jehovah or God, Him Fu or Brahma." The lovely Andante movement, "Love me in my works!", brings us directly into the musical world of Die Zauberflöte. One of the key words is "Wahrheit" ("truth"), the very word the captive Pamina uses as she advises the more practical birdcatcher Papageno. The cantata ends with celebration of the achievement of "life’s true happiness."

The absence of Drew Minter meant that we weren’t going to hear the encore he and Lieberson did at Tanglewood, the great duet from Handel’s Giulio Cesare that Hunt participated in with stunning effect in the famous Sellars/Smith production. But we got Schumann’s "Widmung" ("Dedication" — a poem by Friedrich Rückert); "Deep River" — very quiet, with Lieberson’s reverberating low notes on the word "Lord"; and finally, what Lieberson called her favorite aria, "Vedrai carino" ("You’ll See, My Dearest"), Zerlina’s promise of a private cure for husband’s wounded body, from Don Giovanni. "It doesn’t taste yucky," Lieberson translated, "and the pharmaceutical companies don’t know how to make it." She sang the role once opposite José van Dam, but now approaching 50 (in March), she feels she’s too old to sing the part on stage, and she sang it in a slightly lower key. But it was meltingly beautiful, not in "the ditzy soubrette style" she referred to at Harvard but as "the most beautiful lullaby ever written." Serkin’s trills, too, captured Mozart’s mixture of tickling innuendo and deep tenderness. It was a sublime conclusion.

At Harvard, Lieberson was open and uninhibited. She confessed that the long pause before her first Brahms song was less about centering her concentration than about waiting for the audience to stop rattling programs. She talked about her work with Peter Sellars and Craig Smith on the two staged Bach cantatas that are now out on a glorious Nonesuch recording (with the Emmanuel Orchestra conducted by Smith): "One of those peak experiences." The cantatas, she said, "don’t need to be staged, but they couldn’t be more operatic" ("Operas of the soul," Smith, who was present, called out). She said she loved "being diverse characters," and that playing Debussy’s evasive Mélisande and Berlioz’s heroic Dido (a role she performed triumphantly in the Metropolitan Opera’s Les Troyens earlier this year) "didn’t feel like a stretch — they were two aspects of myself." Responding to a question about what Debussy meant by telling a singer to "forget you’re a singer," she said, "I like to sing music from any time as close to speech as possible."

In the directly ensuing master class, she advised three singers at various levels of accomplishment about both technique ("Most singers need to work on legato") and expression — the way singers have to "conjure up an actual situation" and not forget the paradox that they are expressing their innermost thoughts and feelings while also "sharing them with the world." She both demonstrated these qualities (ravishingly in songs by Brahms and Schumann and especially in conveying the "inner contentment" of Mahler’s "Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen" — "I Have Become Lost to the World") and shared stories of her own difficulties: staying relaxed, keeping her breath free. "Singing, performing," she concluded, "is about ‘heart opening’: my own heart — and, hopefully, the hearts of others."


Issue Date: December 19 - 25, 2003
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