Renée Fleming Takes San Diego by Storm

By Truman C. Wang
Friday, March 22, 2002

PROGRAM   

ESCONDIDO, CALIF -- Is Renée Fleming the greatest singer of them all?

Certainly, there could be no doubt among her rapturous fans in San Diego Friday night, who welcomed the return of their favorite adopted daughter to the concert stage with an enthusiasm that bordered on bedlam. 

The occasion was doubly memorable for the special encore of “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka, a role at San Diego Opera which helped catapult Ms. Fleming to international stardom in the early 1990’s (and which she will reprise at L’Opera Bastille in Paris later this year).

Few Classical artists today, on the recital or operatic stage, have the gumption or technical wherewithal to pull off a program of such dizzying versatility-- and do so with such winsome charm-- as soprano Renée Fleming.   Her emotionally candid and heart-on-sleeve vocalism has won her a large loyal following but at the same time raised the eyebrows of many musical purists, who object to the unwritten swoons and sighs and ritardandos that Ms. Fleming often indulges in.  To her detractors, I urge them to study the recordings of Adelina Patti and Fernando De Lucia.  The singing, as heard on these early, primitive gramophone records, is peppered with far more liberties than Ms. Fleming’s, and the style is pure, old-fashioned Nineteenth Century with direct links to the music’s creators.  An old-fashioned diva that she is, it is inevitable that Ms. Fleming would encounter criticism in this modern age of musical Puritanism. 

One thing there can be no dispute:  Renée Fleming possesses one of the loveliest, most gorgeous voices in the Classical world today.   The warm, velvet tones that draped sensuously over Debussy’s icily cold (and deliciously wicked) harmonic landscape in the Chansons de Bilitis;  the voluptuous curves and turns that graced Alcina’s aria by Handel;  the romantic ardor and exultation that embraced R.Strauss’s Cäcille – There is simply no finer interpreter of these songs today.

In the lighter vein of jazz crossovers, Ms. Fleming effectively demonstrated the timing and vivacity of a fine trouper, proving that she could trill as well as scat.   The Gershwin numbers were specially arranged for Ms. Fleming by pianist Steve Blier– perhaps the finest accompanist in the business today.

To quote Bellini’s famous words to his librettist Count Pepoli: “Opera, through singing, must make one shudder, weep, die.”   To many in the audience Friday night, after the final, heart-wrenching note from Adriana Lecouvre had died away, they must have felt they had died too and gone to Musical Heaven.

Truman C. Wang is editor of Classical Voice.

[ previous | back to top ]