Fleming weaves
powerful vocal magic

 

by David Gordon Duke

Renée Fleming
with Hartmut Höll, piano
For the Vancouver Recital Society
Orpheum, Jan. 20

Arguably North America’s reigning soprano, Renée Fleming is a diva with a difference. Her large repertoire and willingness to explore everything from the 18th century to contemporary work marks her as an adventurous singer; her recently published The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer tells the story of a soprano’s life with candour and disarming self-awareness.

Last night her Orpheum recital for the Vancouver Recital Society stretched from Baroque to Berg and beyond. In her initial set, five English arias from a number of Handel oratorios made an explicit connection with her all-Handel 2004 Decca CD with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, as well as her just-completed run at the Met in Rodelinde.

The arias were, necessarily, scaled to the exigencies of a large hall and the recital platform. Fleming’s voice is powerful, loaded with character, often surprisingly dark. Accompanist Hartmut Höll at once supports, underlines, and intensifies their material, producing a tense drama matching Fleming’s stylized conception of the works.

The highlight of the first half was the teenage Alban Berg’s Seven Early Lieder — astonishingly fine songs compellingly brought to life through Fleming’s vocal magic. Written at the exact moment when the late Romantic tradition was crystallizing into Expressionism, they are infinitely subtle and strikingly powerful. Fleming’s range of vocal colours presaged Berg’s more advanced later idiom in breathy whispers, then lingered with passionate intensity on his long ultra-Romantic lines.

After intermission came a further demonstration of unusually creative programming, with three contemporary American selections each, in its own way, defining the nature of sung American English. Film composer-turned conductor André Previn’s opera A Streetcar Named Desire was premiered in 1998 with Fleming in the cast; the aria I Can Smell the Sea Air has a nostalgic, neo-Samuel Barber feel to it, but it’s effectively crafted and well worth performing. John Kander, best known for his Broadway work, presents in A Letter from Sullivan Ballou a wordy sequence of recitatives, affectingly simple, but demanding a soprano with superlative diction and subtle, dramatic pacing. The showstopping aria Ain’t it a pretty night? from Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah was the evening’s best demonstration of Fleming’s all-round operatic intensity and commanding stage presence.

The concluding group of the official programme returned the overflow audience to far more conventional recital repertoire, with a generous group of popular Schumann lieder. Where moments before Fleming had soared with theatrical passion, here her scale was at once more poetic and intimate, rounding out an evening of striking diversity and remarkable quality.

Fleming began the first of her multiple encores with a sighing tribute to mentors Renata Tebaldi and Victoria de los Angeles in the form of Puccini’s O mio babbino caro — a performance that seemed crafted of sunlight and mountain air. She followed that masterly turn with a roof-raising Strauss song and then Dvorak’s haunting Song to the moon from Rusalka, yet another glimpse of musical moonlight in a recital shimmering with many silvery references.

And if the audience weren’t already loving her enough, Fleming’s easy patter between encores included an arch comparison of her Oscar de la Renta gown to the one Laura Bush was wearing earlier in the evening at the Inaugural Ball. (“My shoes are definitely better,” Fleming observed, flashing a sparkling arch.)

Vancouver Sun
21 January 2005

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