World-renowned mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has died in the American state of New Mexico after a years-long battle with breast cancer, opera officials said there on Saturday.
Born in San Francisco in 1954, Lieberson was 52 years old at the time of her death on July 3 in the Santa Fe home she shared with her husband, Peter.
“It is all very sad,” said Peter Wolfe. “She was such an extraordinary musician and a wonderful person.”
Lieberson was known internationally as a captivating “arch-maverick” of an opera singer whose repertoire ranged from the contemporary to the Baroque.
Her father a music teacher and her mother a contralto and a voice teacher, Lieberson had studied piano, violin and viola by the time she began singing in a high-school choir.
Lieberson studied viola and voice at San Jose State University in the heart of what is now Silicon Valley and later studied voice at Boston Conservancy.
She was 26 when she devoted her musical talents exclusively to singing.
Her career was reportedly launched when Peter Sellars cast her as Sesto, the vengeful son of Pompey, in a modernised production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare at a festival in the state of New York.
The Sellars version of the opera was set in the Middle East, with Sesto an Uzi-toting terrorist.
Lieberson went on to a performing and recording career that took her to France, Japan and other points around the world.
“She was a very serious artist and accomplished heights that many wish they could reach,” said Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe Opera. “She brought something to everything she did that had extra dimensions to it. It wasn’t just the voice; it was the whole thing.”
Her IMG Artists biography showed that her opera roles included Ottavia in L’Incoronazione di Poppea; Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby; Didon in Les Troyens; Triraksha in Peter Lieberson’s Ashoka’s Dream and Carmen in that Berlioz opera.
“She was very discriminating in what she sang,” Gaddes said. “It is hard to describe her, really, because there is such incredible depth to what she did.”
She was honoured by Musical America as the 2001 Vocalist of the Year, according to London-based IMG.
Lieberson was nominated for Grammy Awards for recordings of Handel arias with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Harry Bicket and Britten’s Phaedra with the Hallé Orchestra for Erato, her biography stated.
Lieberson was in international television broadcasts and subsequent video releases of Sellars’s productions of Don Giovanni, Giulio Cesare and Theodora.
IMG said it plans to soon release a recording of her performing her husband’s Rilke Songs with pianist Peter Serkin.
She is survived by her parents and two siblings, Stan Hunt and Susan Hunt. — AFP