LHL IN THE ARCHIVES

posted by James Reel

    From the archives of Fanfare magazine, here’s an interview I conducted a bit more than two years ago with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died this past Monday.

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    It’s finally here—the original soundtrack album, as it were, to the Peter Sellars staging of Bach’s Cantatas BWV 82 (“Ich habe genug”) and 199 (“Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut”). In 2001, Sellars, well known for his work with John Adams and for his updated stagings of operas by Mozart and Handel, recruited mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson to perform the two cantatas in costume and in character. For BWV 82, Hunt Lieberson appeared in a hospital gown, IV tubes attached to her exhausted body, performing the cantata as a monologue about preparing to die. For 199, she donned a flowing blue dress with long red sash to enact a Chinese-theater-inspired journey from self-hatred to “love, release, and freedom.” Sellars’s treatments, as always, caused a bit of a stir; so, in a completely different way, did Hunt Lieberson ’s singing: emotionally intense, tonally radiant, spiritually transcendent.
    Nonesuch has now released an audio-only CD of the music, recorded the year after the live performances (which were not videotaped and so will not be released on DVD) but reuniting Hunt Lieberson with her stage partners, conductor Craig Smith and the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music. That’s a Boston collective of professional musicians founded in 1970 to perform all of Bach’s sacred cantatas in their liturgical contexts. The group has done much else through the years, but Bach has always been its core concern. Interestingly enough, Hunt Lieberson ’s earliest jobs in music were with Emmanuel Music, playing viola and singing in the chorus.
    I spoke to Hunt Lieberson last October when she was in Santa Fe, resting up after performances of BWV 199 with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and preparing for appearances with the Boston Symphony in Pelléas et Mélisande, then looking forward to a trio of December recitals with pianist Peter Serkin, followed by the Mahler Third in February with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Mahler Second in June with the San Francisco Symphony.
    J.R.: How did performing in the staged versions of these cantatas affect the musical interpretation we hear on the CD?
    L.H.L.: I think it did affect it very strongly, but it’s hard for me to say how. Any time you stage something, it can bring a lot more dramatic elements out of the music when they’re actually acted out. And that grows, the more you work on it. When you’re working on an opera or any staged piece, if you record the first rehearsal of the musical run-through and compare that to a recording of the final performance, there’re going to be a lot of differences. Not differences, exactly, but you’re going to hear more depth and a lot of growth.
    J.R.: Had you performed both these cantatas in concert before Peter Sellars got hold of you?
    L.H.L.: I had performed “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut” years ago with Emmanuel Music as part of the Sunday services when I was a member of the professional choir there. They do Bach cantatas every Sunday. So I had done 199, but it was so long ago, I can’t compare how it musically differed from the stage productions. With “Ich habe genug,” it’s a whole ’nother kind of reality when you’re thinking of it as the last half-hour of someone’s life, which is how it’s staged. I was lying on the floor. It was done very simply, not in a hospital bed, but I was on the floor in a hospital gown and socks with rubber on the bottom, and some tubes coming out of me, one attached to my arm like an IV, and one breathing tube to my nose.
    J.R.: Didn’t that make it hard to sing?
    L.H.L.: Oh, it wasn’t actually in my nose; it was taped under it so from a distance it would look like a breathing tube. It was quite profound to experience that cantata and those words in that setting. Most people were very moved by it, but some people were sort of aghast that I would be singing Bach in a hospital gown. Some people want their Bach and their music in general either very glamorous or extremely sanitized. So it was interesting to see those reactions from people used to very formal presentations of Bach, with a person very nicely dressed standing and singing in a very contained manner. But if you look at the text of those two cantatas it’s anything but formal and contained. It’s exactly the opposite—real life, the nitty-gritty. In 199, “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut,” there can’t be anything more dramatic than that as the first line of a piece: “My heart swims in blood.” That’s the ultimate dark night of the soul.
    J.R.: Is it a heavy burden, having to carry an entire Bach cantata without the participation of other soloists or a chorus?
    L.H.L.: I didn’t find them that tiring vocally. One added bonus to physical movement is that you’re releasing a lot of tension that might accumulate if you’re just standing still while singing. In some ways, you could say that standing and singing an ordinary recital, it’s a lot more challenging to stay relaxed and free in the body, especially if your shoes are uncomfortable. But over time you learn how to release tension when you’re standing, too. In the beginning, Peter and I wondered how tiring it would be, but we’ve talked about maybe adding another cantata, probably 170, and that may happen in the future. We may substitute it for one of the other cantatas, or try to do all three; that would be a longer evening, but they’re not that long. Anyway, I didn’t feel vocally strained by singing two full cantatas in an evening. The music is very revitalizing; it’s magic, or shall I say alchemy. It’s about the highest level of alchemy I can think of that we can experience here on the earth.
    J.R.: You’ve sung Baroque music a lot with period-instrument groups led by guys like William Christie and Nicholas McGegan, and you’ve also done a lot with modern-instrument ensembles. What, if anything, changes for you between working with period-instrument groups and modern-instrument groups, and period-practice specialists vs. generalists?
    L.H.L.: Not much. I don’t know that anything changes. The only thing that occurs to me is I’m very instrumentally oriented, and aurally oriented. My first career was as an instrumentalist. I can see how when I’m singing with an ensemble with a different timbre than an original-instrument group would have, how that could affect me unconsciously because I would want to blend with them more, like I did when I played the viola. But it’s nothing I do consciously.
    J.R.: You and Peter Sellars go way back; I know you were involved in his Don Giovanni and Julius Caesar 10 or 15 years ago, and more recently in El Niño.
    L.H.L.: Julius Caesar was the first thing I did with him, in 1985.
    J.R.: Is working with him significantly different from working with the other directors you’ve encountered?
    L.H.L.: Sure, every director is different, and Peter is certainly unique in my experience. It’s always a very interesting journey with him, from start to finish. The rehearsal period is as amazing and stimulating as any part of the run of a show. He’s a visionary, and it’s a brilliant idea to stage “Ich habe genug” the way he did. It just went so deep for me, and for most of the people that I spoke to about it who saw it. He likes to get to the heart of a matter, and he’s not interested in formalizing and sanitizing anything. Not everything works perfectly. The Bach was really great, but when you look at all the work, not everything works and not everything works the first time. The Bach was the exception, these little gems. Something that is a shame in the world of new works, whether it be new works for orchestra or new opera, is that usually there’s very little rehearsal time. Everything’s about money these days, and it’s put together and thrown out there oftentimes with the same amount of rehearsal you would give a very well-known classical work—that same, small amount of time and devotion and nurturing—and it’s usually not enough for a new piece. But it’s put out there as a finished product, which of course it isn’t. I’ve done a lot of new music, starting in the 1970s as a violist; there were times when I did exclusively new music. And now I’m married to a composer, so I feel this especially acutely. I felt very fortunate that when I did Julius Caesar in 1985, it was pretty great the first time around, but then it was revived several times before it was filmed, and things changed; things grew. That’s Handel; that’s an old piece, not exactly a new work, but the staging was new. The Don Giovanni as well—that changed and evolved as we did different productions of it. A lot of things don’t get that chance.
    J.R.: Did you have that kind of time with the Bach, before you made the recording?
    L.H.L.: We had one year between the staging and the recording. They were staged and performed in Boston, New York, London, Paris, and Lucerne in the spring of 2001, and then they were recorded in May of 2002 at Emmanuel Church in Boston.
    J.R.: And did you sense during the recording sessions that anything had evolved during that year, even though it was a period of gestation rather than further performances?
    L.H.L.: Well, it didn’t feel like it had been a year. I had such a busy year, it came around before I knew it and I was right back into it. It wasn’t anything I felt I needed to work on again in preparation. But who knows what subliminal changes there were, or other overtones?
    J.R.: This isn’t relevant to the recording, but it is to any stage work you do with Peter Sellars: one thing I’ve been curious about is how difficult it is for singers to master the hand gestures that he’s so fond of. It’s like choreography for the upper body sometimes.
    L.H.L.: It’s very difficult. Some people just can’t execute it, and sometimes when something doesn’t work, it’s because a singer can’t integrate the movement and the singing and make it natural, and it’s hard. I’ve been doing it almost 20 years, and it’s still hard when I do a piece with Peter. In the Bach, which is hard enough to sing on its own—the vocal lines are so instrumental and finding the most graceful way to express them can be a real challenge—then adding movement at first only seems to make it more difficult. The amazing thing about the work with Peter, for me, is it takes a lot of work, and it’s not the kind of thing you can throw together; when I first did Julius Caesar, I thought. “Oh, my God,” because Sesto was a very strenuous physical role—every aria was dashing around the stage with guns, talking about avenging his father’s death. I thought, “I’m not going to be able to do this,” but it was a long rehearsal period and you have to keep working on it. The amazing thing that happened eventually is that it started to be more comfortable singing it with the movement. But that only happens with time. And unfortunately in a lot of your typical opera houses or orchestra subscription series there’s not enough time to really do intricate work, and do highly detailed and deep work. So that’s the amazing thing—by the end of the run, it starts to feel funny not to do the movement with the singing. Although I just did, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, BWV 199 in concert form, and I loved it, because I felt all the dramatic intensity of the stage piece, but I wasn’t as tired. But I didn’t care about that, really, being tired. It was just as satisfying. It’s not that these things have to be staged; of course, they don’t. It’s never, “Oh, yes, this is the only way to do it.” I don’t think Peter thinks that, either. When people don’t like what Peter does, they like to claim it’s the most extreme, radical thing ever. But it’s been one of the highlights of my career to do those pieces in that way. Those gestures came a little bit later in Peter’s career; they weren’t so pervasive in Julius Caesar and Giovanni. I don’t remember where they started, but for me the first one with a lot of gestures was Handel’s Theodora at Glyndebourne in 1996. I came back to it a couple of months ago, and it was really wonderful to come back to that piece after seven years. And there’s a lot of hand gesture in that. He had mostly the chorus doing a lot of gesture, and since I was Irene, the leader of the Christians, he had me singing in all the Christian choruses. At first I thought, “Oh, my God. I’ve got five or six new pieces to learn,” but they’re fabulous, and I loved singing in choirs in the '70s, and I miss it now. So for me that piece was especially satisfying. There I was doing my solo role and singing with the chorus, incredible choruses. But we had a lot of gesture to learn for those, so it took a lot of time to memorize the gestures and get it all working smoothly. For some people it’s just a huge pain in the ass. Then for others it intensifies the meaning of the words and adds another element to the level of expression.
    J.R.: You also go way back with Craig Smith and this orchestra, starting as a violist. Did you ever play the viola solo in Cantata 199?
    L.H.L.: No. I played very little Baroque viola. I mostly played Classical, Romantic, and contemporary music as a violist. I played the unaccompanied Bach suites as a young viola student, but I didn’t play a Baroque instrument.
    J.R.: A while ago you mentioned wanting to blend your voice with the instrumental ensemble. Did playing the viola affect your vocal approach to the music at all?
    L.H.L.: That’s really hard to say. I did start as a violist, and then I can’t remember how long it was before I joined the chorus. It is such a wonderful group, because it was a professional group, a paid church job for all of us, and I was a student at the time, and making incredible music to boot. It was a real bonus that we were getting paid for it, too. We did a cantata every week, and during the service we’d also sing motets and other incredible music. It all smooshes together at this point. It’s all interwoven. I can’t separate it. It reminds me of somebody the other day very innocently saying, “Okay, now I want you to tell me how your spiritual life affects your singing,” as if somehow it’s a separate compartment. It’s all one thing. I would play Bach chorales as a little kid; when I started playing piano, that was part of my morning routine, sight-reading chorales. So Bach goes way back for me. I was a sensitive child, and certain chords would bring tears to my eyes. It was usually when there was some kind of harmonic shift; it was pretty specific, but I’m just not quite clear now what it was.
    J.R.: Can music still do that to you?
    L.H.L.: Oh, yeah, that’s what I want from music. I did a recital tour last season in which I did a French group. I was really struggling, putting this recital together; it wasn’t falling into place, I couldn’t find one group I wanted to do, so I started going through my favorite French mélodies, and some of them I hadn’t looked at since my conservatory days. I sat down and started playing through Chausson’s "Le colibri," “The Hummingbird,” and I played it through and sang it and burst into tears. So I said. “Okay, this is on the program.” When people say, “Oh, you made me cry,” or, “That was so heartbreaking,” that’s what I want to experience when I hear music, too. And I don’t just mean sad or tragic pieces, but anything, the beauty of anything to move you; it doesn’t have to be sadness. That’s what I look for in a great artist that I want to listen to. People like Christa Ludwig or Janet Baker sometimes would do that to me. My simplistic description is that it’s a kind of heart-voice, where the heart and the voice are connected, and the voice goes right to your heart, and there’s an opening, and when the heart opens is what makes you cry. We all know there’s lots of incredible music, but if it’s not performed in an open or heartfelt way, you’re not going to be moved by it. So I gravitate toward the music that moves me, and fortunately there’s plenty of that around. Handel’s a real heart guy, and when that’s combined with an incredible mind, it’s not exactly like Bach, but you have this amazing brilliance with big heart, and then you’ve got that alchemy that has the power to transform us. Peter Sellars is one of those big heart guys, with an incredibly brilliant mind.
    J.R.: So he pulls a lot of your own heart from you in your performances.
    L.H.L.: I would say at this point all of me gets into a performance with him. If I look back, my first show with him was a lot about remembering all the moves and I was more self-conscious abut the whole thing. But over the years I’ve become very comfortable with the work, although it’s still very difficult at first. But I’m familiar with the general style that Peter works with, not that that doesn’t change, but yeah, we’re often doing these pieces that at some level are about transformation, and certainly the Bach cantatas are, and a lot of the operas are; if you’re talking abut the trajectory of any character from beginning to end, there’s some kind of journey or transformation, so that’s very important. For myself, and I know for other people who have worked on these shows, we often find that life imitates art, and you find your life going through a lot of transformation during the work. I’m all for that. It’s not always pleasant, but transformation isn’t always pleasant. That’s one of the many reasons I love working with Peter. I may have gone through a different journey as a violist, but when I look at Emmanuel and all of us on that tour, they were on the stage with me, so they could see me, we were all listening and feeling it and going through it together in a way, so I wouldn’t want to say that they were just looking at the music and playing it and not getting the full effect. It was a profound experience for them, too.