Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
Horn Concerto	Peter Lieberson	Listen
Rilke Songs	Peter Lieberson
The Six Realms	Peter Lieberson	Listen

Reviews

• Not since Benjamin Britten wrote for his partner Peter Pears has a composer found so inspiring a muse as Peter Lieberson has in his wife, the superbly gifted mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Her probing intelligence and radiant tone inform everything she sings, and her rendition of her husband's Rilke Songs, which headline this irresistibly listenable disc, puts those gifts to great use. Lieberson's writing is tender, impulsive and endlessly responsive to the text, with poignant piano accompaniments (by Peter Serkin) as background to Hunt Lieberson's fluid and effusive singing. The rest of the disc is no less revelatory; it includes The Six Realms, a colorful and wonderfully varied concerto for amplified cello and orchestra, and a more traditional Horn Concerto, given a sumptuous performance with William Purvis as the soloist.
  Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
• ...The disc opens with a performance of Rilke Songs, sung by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson with Peter Serkin at the piano, recorded live at the Ravinia Festival in 2004...The composer's earlier music was always infused with a spiritual dimension; it was intellectually challenging and emotionally powerful, as well as vividly pictorial and dramatic. But recent years have brought a new warmth, a new depth, and an accessibility that does not compromise complex ideas, craftsmanship, and feelings…The settings are at once intellectual and intuitive, elusive but also very much present in the here-and-now...

  Lieberson wrote The Six Realms for cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Project...The six realms in question come from the cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism...Lieberson characterizes each of them, and the sorrow of the world, with abundance of lustrous, expressive melody borne on vivid harmonies and writing that spans the whole range of the orchestra...The Horn Concerto...[is] a complex, richly human work that continuously springs engaging surprises.
  Richard Dyer, Boston Globe