Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

Nobody who heard the voice of the American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died of cancer in the summer of 2006 aged 52, remained unaffected. She had an extraordinary capacity for emotional connection, such that her performances seemed to penetrate the very marrow of those fortunate enough to witness them. Inextricable from the passion she brought to her music was an incomparable beauty of phrasing, a matchless, velvety tone and a quality, barely definable, of rapture. Her artistic powers were still in full and glorious flow; she was one of the greatest mezzos of our age. A woman of immense grace, she was disarming in her candour and warmth.

To British audiences, she was best known for her collaborations with the director Peter Sellars. In 1996, and again in 2003, she took the role of Irene in his staging of Handel's oratorio Theodora at Glyndebourne. As the Guardian critic Andrew Clements pointed out when reviewing the revival, her singing of the aria Lord to Thee Each Night and Day was alone worth the price of a ticket. It is immortalised on a CD she made the following year of Handel arias with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and conductor Harry Bicket. The brevity of her career, her preference for privacy and her lack of attachment to a major record label - she valued, above all, the immediacy of live performance - account for her being less well-known than her stature merited.

January 2007 sees two major releases celebrating the remarkable talent:

The first is a disc of songs by her composer husband Peter Lieberson, who adapted five sonnets from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda for this work, jointly commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. Ever since its May 2004 debut in L.A., fans and critics have clamoured for its release on CD. As Tim Page of the Washington Post wrote, following the premiere, ‘Neruda Songs - a setting of five love poems on deep and wrenching subjects such as passing delight, memory, fear of separation and transcendence beyond death - is one of the most extraordinary affecting artistic gifts ever created by one lover to another... I hope the Neruda Songs are recorded, for they are just as universal as they are shatteringly personal.’

The second disc is the re-release of the live Wigmore Hall recital she gave with Roger Vignoles in 1998. It appeared briefly on disc some years ago, but a lot of people will have missed it and and it is well worth mentioning again now - ‘The sheer spiritual power, the sheer heartfelt sincerity and warmth of feeling in her every utterance is overwhelmingly moving’ The Telegraph