They were first heard on the East Coast Thanksgiving weekend 2005, with James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony in the orchestra’s acoustically renowned Symphony Hall. '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 extraordinarily affecting artistic gifts ever created by one lover to another…they are just as universal as they are shatteringly personal.”-Washington PostĬomposer Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, written for and performed by his late wife, the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson are settings of poems by the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
