ASO closes season with music about love from Lieberson and Mozart

It’s a beautiful thing when the highlights of the classical season are contemporary works.

Last week’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts included two world premieres by American composers -- Jennifer Higdon and Michael Gandolfi -- whose extroverted music speaks directly, candidly, to a broad audience, what might be called populist Americana for the 21st century.

This week’s ASO program, closing its 65th season, features another American composer of different inclinations. Peter Lieberson’s “Neruda Songs” -- elliptical, achingly lyrical and deeply emotional -- come with the most wrenching narrative in classical music today.

The composer set five poems from the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s collection “100 Love Sonnets” and fashioned them, in the original Spanish, into a sort of story line for his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who sang the premiere in 2005 and died, from breast cancer, a year later.

The poems themselves speak of their real-life love and are premonitions of their loss -- a loss shared by everyone who was profoundly moved by Hunt Lieberson’s uniquely passionate singing.

Robert Spano conducted Hunt Lieberson in the “Neruda Songs” in Cleveland at the end of 2005. He returned to them Thursday in Symphony Hall with the ASO and Kelley O’Connor, a charismatic young mezzo with smoke in her dark voice and an almost androgynous sound.

O’Connor proved that these songs, like all masterpieces, transcend the personalities and styles of the original performers.

In the opening song, sultry and languid and translated as “If your eyes were not the color of the moon,” O’Connor hung on phrases with disarming poignancy. Her interpretation was heartfelt but innocent. In the perfectly crafted song “Ya eres mía” -- “And now you’re mine” -- she matched in temperament and soul the Latin American accent and spice.

Lieberson is a reformed atonalist -- the sort of modernism that’s now all but banished from American concert halls -- and it was only after he met Lorraine Hunt that he let down his intellectual defenses and started writing emotionally direct music, with expressionist echoes of Mahler and Berg. “Probably my earlier pieces were more about testosterone," Lieberson said, "then I found love, and that’s what you’re hearing now in my music.”

It's an idea that Spano and the ASO exploited by placing Lieberson between Mozart’s final two symphonies.

Their reading of the Symphony No. 40, to open the evening, felt under-prepared: lacking sexiness and sensuality, it sounded dry and two-dimensional.

But at concert’s end, Symphony No. 41 (nicknamed the “Jupiter”), burst with vitality and ideas and orchestral cohesion.