Philiv KAENNICOTT A Lorraine Hunt Lieberson archiv e find prompts excitement, puzzlement and then a profound search for understanding

Jhave that awful, bruised fingernail feeling that comes from wildly tearing into the plastic on a new CD. It's rare that something arrives so enticing that I can't wait to open it. But a new disk of mezzosoprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing at Wigmore Hall in 1999 definitely qualifies.

Never mind the strange, Lazarus-like return of the voice, only two years after her dearly lamented death in 2006. I guess we've come to accept that in the digital age, when it's safer to assume that a microphone is listening than not, a recording artist never really dies. There's always something left in the vault if you root around long enough.

that she was singing directly to you, whispering confidences.

And yet, after three hearings, I don't honestly know what to make of this disc. I began, and remain, inclined to love it. And many of the first tracks, devoted to Brahms's Songs, Op 57, are beautifully done. But it's the music that I wanted to hear most - Schumaim's Frauenliebe und -leben - that most frustrates. The singing is intense, the conception grand. But she seems to love these songs to death.

It's all very strange. Mostly, the problem is a matter of tempo. Hunt Lieberson takes the cycle very, very slowly, extending the eight songs to nearly half an hour's length. Granted, the cycle begins larghetto, with a pensive, halting, uncertain accompaniment, as if the woman who is about to tell us about her great love is lost and stumbling in the world. And several of the subsequent songs are marked with variations on Schumaim's favourite and utterly enigmatic tempo marking, innig, which means "intimate." Which isn't a tempo marking at all. It's a bit

Eke consulting a cook book before putting a cake in the oven only to learn that you should bake it "fervently".

Anyone who's ever been in love recognises the succession of bewildering emotions captured in Chamisso's verses. There is disbelief, delight in the physicality of the beloved, dream-like joy and the pleasure of remembering first encounters. There's also the rapture of

There is a jewel-like perfection crafted throughout this little cycle. And its ending, which returns musically to the halting figure heard at the beginning, is existentially brutal. Everything we love dies, every security in another person is shattered.

I would like to be convinced by Hunt Lieberson's slow-motion account. It doesn't feel capricious, she's not a tempo-whacko, an artist Eke Bernstein or Celibidache, with perverse ideas about pacing. Her instincts are usually dead on.

Hunt Lieberson was, however, a great artist, and when a great artist does something odd, we're compelled to find the genius in it. Or at least make a good faith effort to understand it on its own terms. Does it matter that she recorded these songs in 1999, the same year that she was married? My first and best guess is that she felt a depth and importance in this little cycle that she could only work out by expanding its contours, sinking deeply into every line and syllable, and as she did so, the tempi got slower and the piece itself sprawled out before her.

But I hate doing this. It's too psychological, too dependent on biographical speculation. And it's also not like Hunt Lieberson to get lost in music simply because it had some particularly deep appeal for her. Biographical facts often feel Eke useful facts, but it's so difficult to make any practical application of them. One might very well extrapolate from the reality of one's own marriage that Chamisso gets love and marriage all wrong. That he is lost in some 19th-century adolescent fantasy of desire and dependence. Perhaps Hunt Lieberson sings these songs this way because she doesn't, in fact, like them, rather Eke Glenn Gould played Mozart.

But that isn't her, either. No. The only sense I can make of this reading is that she sang these songs this way because she heard them this way. That's an unsatisfying bit of wisdom, but often, with art, it's the only explanation you can find. After attempting to make sense of something that seems strange, you have a choice. Live with it, enter into it, find some empathy for the reading. Or set it aside. I think I'll do both. Set it aside and then return to it, in a year or so. Hunt Lieberson is an artist who gets under your skin, and perhaps I am already liking her Schumann in ways that I'm not even aware of yet.