Composer Peter Lieberson has turned to the rich history of Tibetan Buddhism for his latest composition, a chamber work with narration entitled King Gesar that has its world premiere recording (SK 57971) on Sony Classical, featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianists Emanuel Ax and Peter Serkin, and narrator Omar Ebrahim. King Gesar was released October 1, 1996.

King Gesar explores the life and spiritual quest of the 10th-century Tibetan ruler, King Gesar of Ling, and it is scored for a unique combination of instruments and a distinctive spoken narration from a text by Douglas Penick. Lieberson has called King Gesar "a campfire opera", designed to capture the atmosphere of the storytelling around a campfire or in a village square, a practice Tibetans have enjoyed for centuries. It tells the dramatic story of King Gesar's struggle for enlightenment and spiritual growth while dealing with earthly conflicts and saving Tibet from demonic forces. In the Tibetan culture, the story has gathered the same mystique the Arthurian legend and Homer's The Iliad have in Western civilization.

The idea for King Gesar was born when the composer Hans Werner Henze commissioned Lieberson to write a piece for the Munich Biennial that would utilize a narrator and include Ma, Ax and Serkin as performers. Lieberson expanded the ensemble to include flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), French horn, trombone and percussion. The narration is designed to be spoken in a strict stylized manner, rhythmically precise and quickly chanted in the manner of Tibetan Buddhist tradition. King Gesar is the first in a cycle of four operatic works by Peter Lieberson entitled The Cycle of the Ancestral Sovereigns, dealing with the creation of enlightened society and the enlightened rulers who made that possible. The second opera in the cycle -- Ashoka's Dream, also with a libretto by Douglas Penick -- had its world premiere in 1997 by the Santa Fe Opera.

The score for King Gesar will be heard in Warrior Songs: The Legend of King Gesar, a TV production for The Bravo Network of Canada that may also air in the USA. Douglas Penick's The Warrior Songs of King Gesar, from which the texts for King Gesar were drawn, was published by Wisdom Publications.

The son of Goddard Lieberson, onetime president of Columbia Records, and ballerina Vera Zorina, Peter Lieberson has been a follower of Tibetan Buddhism since his university days. He moved to Boulder, CO to devote himself to studies with Chogyam Shambala, a Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist master, after he completed musical studies at Columbia University. After moving to Boston to direct Shambhala Training, Lieberson attended Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. degree. His Piano Concerto (1983) and symphonic work Drala (1986) were immediately acclaimed after their world premieres with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which has commissioned from him a Second Piano Concerto. It will be premiered in the 1998-99 season, along with an orchestral work commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra. After teaching at Harvard University (1984-88), Lieberson moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia to become international director of Shambhala training. His principal composition teachers were Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Donald Martino and Martin Boykan. He is the recipient of the Brandeis Creative Arts Award and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.