I was struck by the obvious power of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson story and what a great tragedy her loss was, particularly from cancer. I wonder how many of her doctors, nurses and others who care for her knew who she was. I am an active Nurse Practitioner in a ER/UCC for cancer patients and try to remind my self and my student NP’s to make an effort to “find out� who are the people we care for.

Much is made of the mind body connection to cancer but little is every made of the provider patient connection. What is it that makes us who we are and how can I your care giver enter this space.

How do we teach others to make a connection to the human side of disease? How much easier would it be to care for an illness if we knew a little about the person who has it?

As the old folk song lyric went, “the nurses didn’t know it, but my grandmother was a poet�.

Dennis Graham RN NP
Nurse Practitioner Clinical Program Director
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
1275 York Avenue
New York NY 10021
Office 212 639-3028
Fax 212 717-3568
grahamd@mskcc.org

Open Source, a one-hour radio program distributed on NPR by Public Radio International, had Peter Sellars, Craig Smith of Emmanuel Music, oboist Peggy Pearson, and countertenor Drew Minter on today, talking about their colleague Lorraine Hunt Lieberson…

But, for personal reasons, this week I pulled out a recording of a simple song by Fauré, “Melisande’s Song”, which was written for an English production of Maeterlinck’s play in the late 1890s. This song has never been published, but it was performed in a Boston Symphony concert conducted by Simon Rattle as an insertion into Fauré’s suite of music from the play.

Several years later, the BSO was scheduled for a weekend recording session in which everything had to be changed at the last minute, because the pianist scheduled to record the Liszt concertos was sick. The DG producer, recording engineer, and equipment were all there, and the BSO schedule had been mapped to include the session. They decided to record some music that the orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus had recently performed to produce an all-Fauré disk–with the “Pelléas et Mélisande” suite as one of the featured works.

I recalled the lovely song of Mélisande from several years earlier and suggested to Costa Pilavachi, the BSO’s artistic administrator, that including this unpublished song would make the recording unique. He ran the idea past Seiji, who thought it was a good one–provided they could get the music. Happily the orchestra’s librarian had retained photocopies of the manuscript score and parts. All that remained was to find a singer on a few hours’ notice. The soprano who had originally sung the piece under Rattle’s direction was nowhere near. But Lorraine Hunt had begun to make her mark as a singer in Boston, so Costa called her to see if she was available and interested.

An hour later on that Saturday morning, she came to Symphony Hall, looked at the piece, and agreed to sing it. A few hours later, the song was “in the can.” This turned out to be Lorraine’s first commercial recording–and even with so simple a musical number, many reviewers commented on the vocal beauty, the impeccable diction, and the expressive artistry of this still-unknown singer.

She made many memorable recordings after that, but, for obvious reasons, I have a special fondness for this one (DG 423089).

Steve Ledbetter

http://www.slate.com/id/2145152/

I won’t dwell on why music critics feel compelled to say such stupid things — the word “relevant” alone is just so twentieth century, don’t you think? — but it’s not necessarily a bad point for all that. LHL’s voice is extraordinarily personal — “personal” as in “personality,” for one thing. Rich in character, distinctive. As a performer, she had a strong and wonderful affinity for the meaning of texts (maybe that’s where the Mitchell comment came from) and a rare gift for letting the words with music be the focus of her performance.

And while we are remembering LHL, what other singers out there are working with both their hearts and their brains?