From recital to orchestral song: Renée Fleming’s vocal artistry continues to shine

Paul Hyde & Mark Gresham | 15 APR 2024

We offer here a pair of intrinsically related reviews: First, a recital on April 3 by Renée Fleming at the Peace Center in Greenville, South Carolina, followed by an April 11 concert by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in which Fleming was the featured guest soloist.

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Renée Fleming shines in nature-inspired song recital in Greenville, SC

Visiting Greenville, SC’s Peace Center for the first time in many years, Renée Fleming on April 3 offered a unique recital — one with meaning, though not in any way preachy.

The eclectic group of songs in “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene” reflected Fleming’s longtime concern with climate change. The “Anthropocene” is the term some scientists use for today’s geologic epoch, the era in which humankind has put its possibly fatal stamp on the environment.

But for the most part, Fleming’s song choices — and an accompanying National Geographic Society video — simply celebrated the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

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Fleming, one of America’s reigning sopranos, was in luminous voice, and she was warmly received by a near-capacity audience at the Peace Center. Accompanied by pianist Bradley Moore, Fleming opted for a handheld mic for more contemporary songs and put it aside for classics as the program journeyed back and forth through centuries. It encompassed a range of styles.

This was an art-song recital, one to showcase artful singing, not to test a soprano to her utmost. But the variety of music was impressive, ranging from classical songs to Björk’s “All is Full of Love,” Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now” and, in Elvish no less, “Twilight and Shadow” from Howard Shore’s soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings.

Fleming opened the evening with a bluesy version of singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens’ “Pretty Bird” then jumped back about 280 years to offer a lovely account of Handel’s lyrical “Care Selve” (“Dear Woods”) from Atalanta.

Joseph Canteloube’s “Bailero” from Songs of the Auvergne showcased Fleming’s rich vocal midrange. A couple of haunting contemporary songs struck a more ominous tone: Nico Muhly’s haunting “Endless Space” and Kevin Puts’ prickly “Evening,” the latter of which includes the line “We know we are doomed/done for, damned.”

Much of the material was taken from Fleming’s 2021 Grammy Award-winning album, also titled Voice of Nature.

The National Geographic video created for the program, and coordinated with the songs, offered a variety of shifting landscapes and wild animals seemingly chosen from across the continents. There were alarming images of Earth in extremis: fires, floods, parched earth, oil rigs and smokestacks in full eruption. More numerous were pleasing pictures: lion cubs, polar beers, jellyfish in surreal light and an eagle in glorious flight.

It may sound a bit hokey, but the images were heartwarming and beautifully photographed.

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The second half of the recital dispensed with the screen and featured Fleming in golden voice and sparking golden dress. At the audience’s enthused reception, she quipped, “I still love gown applause.” Fleming offered some emotive accounts of songs by Gabriel Fauré and Edvard Grieg.

It may be that Fleming’s voice has lost some of its power through the years — she began scaling back opera appearances years ago — but she certainly sounded radiant in Puccini’s soaring “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi. She stylishly caressed Jerome Kern’s 1939 “All the Things You Are.”

Moore was a sensitive and versatile accompanist.

Fleming’s final selection, before two encores, was Andrew Lippa’s hilarious self-parody “The Diva.” Throughout the recital, Fleming was the most down-to-earth diva imaginable, chatting casually with the audience.

She turned her two encores into audience singalongs: “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady and “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. If this performance was, in part, a consciousness-raising recital, it could hardly have been more charming.

Music as Medicine

On the night before her recital, Fleming hosted a public discussion focused on another of her passions: the therapeutic benefits of music. The April 2 conversation, featuring local experts, occurred just a few days before the publication of an anthology Fleming edited, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness.

The discussion in the Peace Center’s Gunter Theatre offered fascinating insights into how music can, for instance, assist Parkinson’s disease patients regain mobility and help other patients deal with pain issues. Music therapy is being used also to help alleviate maladies such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism spectrum disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, and traumatic brain injuries, among others.

Fleming, who has long been interested in research exploring the intersection of the arts, health and neuroscience, has presented this “Music and Mind” discussion in more than 50 cities worldwide. She can be cherished not only as one of the finest sopranos of our times but as a popularizer, and leading advocate for, this fascinating, growing and beneficial field of study. ■

~Paul Hyde

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All-Strauss concert with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

Renée Fleming’s Greenville recital on April 3 was one of three she performed in the region beginning Easter Sunday, when she presented her recital program at the Lucas Theatre for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia, then again on April 6 at RiverCenter for the Performing Arts in Columbus, Georgia, before her appearance with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on Thursday in an all-Richard Strauss concert with music director Nathalie Stutzmann conducting.

The first half of the concert was a brilliant programming move. The Sextet from Strauss’ opera Capriccio opened the concert, performed by six of the ASO’s principal and associate principal strings: violinists David Coucheron and Justin Bruns, cellists Daniel Laufer and Karen Freer, and violists Zhenwei Shi and Paul Murphy. The lights dimmed for both the hall and the majority of the stage, with white light focused upon the six musicians at the front of the orchestra. Renée Fleming sat in the dark just to their side at the front, and music director Natalie Stutzman sat in the dark on the podium.

A truly breathtaking performance of the Sextet ensued.

Near the end, Stutzmann quietly rose to stand on the podium, and Fleming moved to the soloist’s spot as the lights on the orchestra gradually rose on the full orchestra. This made for a seamless and musically electrifying transition to introduce Strauss’s Four Last Songs, the anticipated centerpiece of the evening.

If there was any shortcoming to the transition, it was not musical. Rather, the light that illuminated the full orchestra was a different color from the white light for the Sextet; it was a garish (and annoying) warm pinkish color that made the musicians look as if they were seated in the meat department of a local Winn-Dixie.

Fleming exhibited most of the attributes of her stellar reputation as a vocalist: the luminosity, beauty, poise, and artistic expressiveness were all there, but what was not there was the vocal power she once had. Her lower range was especially difficult to hear over the orchestra.

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Was it the hall’s acoustics? Was it Stutzman having the orchestra play too loud? I don’t think so. The music itself prevented Stutzmann from indulging in bombast. Any further reductions in overall dynamics would likely have undermined the entire. So what we got was essentially a “best compromise” under the circumstances.

The orchestra was nicely balanced in this concert, perhaps due partly to a new seating arrangement with some rows of strings up on risers, with the contrabass section to the audience left behind the cellos and first violins, the violas on the inside right, and the second violins at the front on the audience right. Two harps were behind the violas on the right rather than their usual position on the left. After multiple experiments with seating the orchestra on stage, Stutzmann has found the most effective arrangement for the musicians. That would especially play out sonically in the final work on the program, the Suite from Der Rosencavalier. We’ll get to that in a moment.

In the meantime, Fleming changed her performance attire for the second half and sang what was billed as Four Orchestral Songs, compiled from different Opus numbers (two of them orchestrated by Robert Heger rather than Strauss himself), which proved the lesser of the two sets of songs for Fleming.

We then came to the final work, the Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, which turned out to be the orchestra’s showpiece for the evening.

Throughout the performance, but especially in this Suite, it was almost as if another conductor possessed Stutzmann’s body, and it could credibly be called her best performance so far with the ASO as a conductor. This part of Richard Strauss’ oveure appears to be conspicuously down the mainstream of her conducting capabilities (unlike Beethoven or Bruckner), at least from the audience’s perspective. The orchestra gave us a laser-focused performance, playing at the very top of their game.

If you want to hear Fleming sing in recital and missed her Greenville, Savannah, and Columbus performances this time around, have no fear: on Sunday, it was revealed that she will return to Atlanta to perform a recital in the pristine acoustics of Spivey Hall on February 22, 2025. And if you are a big René Fleming fan, that will surely be the ideal place to hear her vocal artistry. ■

~Mark Gresham

EXTERNAL LINKS:

• Renée Fleming: reneefleming.com
• Renée Fleming: reneefleming.com
• Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: aso.org
• Nathaie Stutzmann: charlottesymphony.org

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