July 5 (Bloomberg) -- It's not often that you hear a singer and know that you will never hear her like again.

With Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died tragically young at 52 on July 3, the uniqueness of timbre was such that you have to search half a century back in musical memory to find an artist in remotely the same mold.

The precedent is Kathleen Ferrier, the English switchboard operator who, rising in the London blackout of World War II, expressed in a half-trained contralto voice an organic quality of tone that seemed close to extinction even as she sang.

Ferrier, like Hunt, started late and appeared on stage first as an instrumentalist -- she played the piano, Hunt, the viola -- before finding her voice in English oratorio.

And what a voice it was -- rounded, centered, immensely strong; tender yet never plaintive and with the arching, unbroken line of instrumental interpretation. The same adjectives can be applied equally and without qualification to both singers.

Ferrier built her career on the baroque -- Bach, Handel and Gluck -- exactly as Hunt did. She went on to engage with living composers, playing the title role in Benjamin Britten's ``Rape of Lucretia'' at Glyndebourne in 1946, before breaking a cancer- weakened hip on stage at Covent Garden in the second act of Gluck's ``Orfeo ed Euridice'' in February 1953. She died seven months later at the age of 41.

Saariaho, Gluck

Hunt played in John Harbison's ``The Great Gatsby'' at the Metropolitan Opera in 1999 and was forced to withdraw from Kaija Saariaho's ``L'Amour de Loin'' at the following year's Salzburg Festival because of cancer. Most poignantly, she had signed up to sing Gluck's ``Orfeo'' at the Met in May 2007 before a recurrence of cancer took her life.

Like Ferrier, Hunt was unpompous in rehearsal and unfussy on stage. She seemed almost bewildered by the sound that emerged when she opened her mouth, yet the effulgence of her ``Who May Abide'' in Handel's Messiah was volcanic, an irresistible eruption. At an indelible Wigmore Hall debut recital in London, she emulated Ferrier's love of English folksong with a rendition of ``Deep River,'' an American spiritual.

Like Ferrier, Hunt will achieve posterity on records, though sparingly -- some Bach, Handel, Purcell and a shimmering set of songs by her composer husband, Peter Lieberson. Once heard, never forgotten.

(Norman Lebrecht is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Norman Lebrecht on norman.lebrecht@virgin.net

Last Updated: July 5, 2006 09:38 EDT