Luminous
It's a beautiful summer evening in New York. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson would have poured herself into Samuel Barber's “Knoxville, Summer of 1915″ (unforgettable text by James Agee):
…It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto: a quiet auto: people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them in vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squaring with clowns in hueless amber.
If the porches were stoops, and there were many many cars, this would be New York. I remember hearing Hunt Lieberson back in November, in Boston, when she sang Pablo Neruda poems that her husband had set for her. This Agee text seemed like her to me tonight.