Curious

I find it interesting that the San Francisco Symphony dedicated its first concert set of the season (Brahms 4 + Dawn Upshaw singing Lukas Foss's Time Cycle) to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, with a full-page remembrance...

...whereas the San Francisco Opera didn't even list her in memoriam.

Comments

[sfmike]

Whoops!

But in other news, what did you think of the Lukas Foss piece? I heard it at the "Mavericks" concert years ago and was amused but not particularly impressed. I think it was Lauren Flanigan singing.

I'm going tomorrow night, even though I've started hating everything Brahms ever wrote except for the "Variations on a Theme by Haydn."

[Lisa Hirsch]

Oh, man, her omission from the opera program is a bad blunder.

[Grant Barnes]

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson was scheduled to sing in the Mahler Third with the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend. Salonen asked that the following be placed in the program: “The Los Angeles Philharmonic dedicates these performances to the memory of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.”

In the pre-concert talk to about 400 people in the attached ARCO Hall Friday evening (which is scheduled to be uploaded Monday onto the LA Phil’s website), Salonen said that he hadn’t wanted to talk about her but, perhaps sensing the warmth of the audience, did so, describing her as “unique,” and saying that “sometimes these people appear who seem to have it all.” He first said how hopeless it was to describe musical phenomena with words and then went on to describe LHL’s “incredible quality of being everywhere in the room, no matter what size, at the same time” and the “intense presence of this beautiful thing.” He recalled an “amazing” experience when he started rehearsing with her “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.”

Salonen said that she had “a habit” of always rehearsing facing the orchestra in order to establish emotional contact with the players. When she got to the point in the Mahler of describing a “beautiful tree to fall asleep under forever,” the orchestra couldn’t continue playing, “the wind players were in tears,” and so she sang the piece to the end without the orchestra, presumably continuing to face them, full-on in the intense emotion of the moment.

Then, Deborah Borda quoted LHL to the effect that she was in the business of soaring, and left the memorial moments at that.

In Mahler's Third, the last words the alto sings are, "Ach komm und erbarme dich ueber mich."

I'm grateful the San Francisco Symphony chose to memorialize her by dedicating music, her soul, back to her.

[M. C-]

thank you, grant, for posting this comment and letting me know about that talk, which i'm glad to have heard. i'm enjoying imagining esa-pekka in his nietzsche-reading teenage years.

as for the sf opera, the rigoletto program has a new set of in memoriam entries, but still no lhl. perhaps she's in the fledermaus program? it seems incredibly strange to me.

i do wish i had heard lauren flanigan's take on that. i missed it that time around.