Mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson dies

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Internationally acclaimed mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whose repertoire ranged from Baroque to the contemporary, has died.

She died Monday morning at her Santa Fe home with her husband, composer Peter Lieberson, at her side, said Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe Opera. She was 52.

The singer had battled breast cancer in recent years and canceled performances in 2005 and 2006 because of back problems. Her death shocked the music world because she often kept details about her health private, Gaddes said.

Nonetheless, he said she was in a class of her own.

"Her voice was so extraordinarily beautiful," he said. "She was just an amazing musician and very serious about her work. She was towering, really."

The trade newspaper Musical America named her vocalist of the year in 2001.

A native of the San Francisco Bay area, Hunt Lieberson began her musical career as a violist and later became a recitalist, concert singer and operatic performer, according to her biography on the IMG Artists Web site.

She met her husband at the Santa Fe Opera during the 1997 production of Peter Lieberson's "Ashoka's Dream," in which she played Triraksha.

Laurent Naouri, a leading French baritone, said Tuesday from Santa Fe that the French likely will remember Hunt Lieberson for her representation of Phaedra in Rameau's "Hippolyte et Aricie."

"That was her big time, her big day," Naouri said of Hunt Lieberson's 1997 Baroque performance.

"When she sang her character, people would forget all that is conventional in opera," Naouri said. "People would forget even her singing; they would just feel something so deep and true, and I think that's what opera ideally is meant to be. But I think it's very difficult to meet that level of commitment."

On the opera stage, Hunt Lieberson had excelled in roles as diverse as Ottavia (Monteverdi), Ariodante (Handel), Sesto (Mozart), Carmen (Bizet), Myrtle Wilson (Harbison) and Didon (Berlioz), according to IMG Artists, which represented her.

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