Reviews

Renée Fleming, soprano & Gerald Martin Moore, piano
February 23, 2019, Sandler Center
Review by John Campbell

The Virginia Arts Festival brought us a wonderful evening of music with Renée Fleming, a much loved American icon and superstar. Her warm, inviting energy lets her come past the edge of the stage to metaphorically embrace the audience. The 1200 seat Sandler Center hall was completely full. There was excitement in the air and a sense of occasion and we were all enthralled. She is no longer a full time opera singer but her career has expanded in several ways. She has appeared with Virginia Symphony Orchestra in Strauss' Four Last Songs and twice before in recital here.

This evening's performance offered a buffet feast of music of Brahms art songs, favorite Puccini arias, Italian songs and arias, Broadway and Cabaret and a new piece, Kevin Puts' work in progress, Letters from Georgia.

Pianist Gerald Martin Moore was a fine match. He is an internationally renowned singing teacher and vocal consultant and has worked with Ms. Fleming in opera, recordings and recitals.

For the opening Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) songs she chose five titles in their original German. Fortunately the projected super titles gave us a line-by-line English translation as she sang Vergebliches Standchen (Futile Serenade). Warned by her mother, the young girl knows exactly how to handle the ardent man who arrives at her door. It is evening and it is cold outside. In singing that captured the humor in their dialogue, he asks that she let him in and she declines. He knows his heart will freeze and thus extinguish his love. She has good advice: if your love starts dying go home to bed and rest. Goodnight.

Other folk songs set by Brahms included Die Mainacht (May night), a charming tale of the girl talking to a swallow, asking how to keep love fresh after nesting together for years. A Swabian folksong, Da unten im Tale (Down in the valley) told us that even the water is sad as the girl confides in us that he speaks of love and fidelity but she must let him go because his love has faded, no matter what he has said.

The fourth song, Meine Liebe ist grün (My love is green) has a text written by the composer's eighteen-year-old godchild, Felix Schumann (yes, Robert and Clara's child). A love song based on nature, love is like the beauty of the sun. My soul, like the nightingale, has wings, moving among the elder blossoms; drunk with the fragrance, rejoicing with love's happy songs. Wiegenlied is a lullaby using natural things, like flowers, as the symbol of the young child: “Dream, dream blossom of my love...this is a heaven for me.”

Her next set offered two songs from Letters from Georgia, a five song, twenty-minute cycle, Kevin Puts' third ever vocal composition and composed for Ms. Fleming. Settings of letters from Georgia O'Keefe (1887-1986), a pioneer of abstract art who later painted flowers and architectural subjects with a Surrealist flavor from her rural New Mexico home. The piece is being expanded by the composer to include letters from her male companion, photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) to be sung by a baritone. Stieglitz had an influence on modern photography being regarded as an art form. O'Keefe and Stieglitz married in 1924.

From Letters from Georgia Ms. Fleming sang Introduction and Taos and Canyon. The first lines sung are “My first memory is of the brightness of the light—light all around.” Of this song, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Puts says “It serves the piece well because the sun is incessantly burning throughout the piece.” He continues “I spent months going over these letters, looking for things she said that were particularly beautiful and meaningful.” Ms. Fleming captured all this beauty with passion as she sang Canyon which speaks of walking toward a sunset with sky ablaze with lightning. She sings of the absurdity of how much she loves this country and the sky. That love was palpable in the care with which it was sung.

The movie set (pun intended, she told us) included songs from three recent films that use her recorded singing. The first was from Bel Canto and the song was Aria (Cantilena) from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. This creamy vocalise is a great favorite and was delivered gorgeously. There is another connection with the film for Ms. Fleming—she is creative consultant for Lyric Opera of Chicago where the opera Bel Canto was commissioned as part of the Renée Fleming initiative. She was on the team with composer Jimmy Lopez and Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist Nilo Cruz that brought the opera to Chicago and in 2016 to PBS audiences nationwide.

Of the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Ms. Fleming told us of her surprise at hearing her voice as the film opened. It seems that her recording of Tis the Last Rose of Summer from the opera Martha by Fredrich von Flotow from Ms. Fleming's CD The Beautiful Voice had been leased for use and no one had told her! The third was from the movie The Shape of Water and the song, You'll Never Know (Warren/Gordon arr. Desplat), where her inner chanteuse emerged to wow us once again.

After intermission we heard four Italian songs highlighting the beauty of that language. Ombra di Nube by Licinio Refice (1883-1954) “from the azure sky light poured into my heart,” as clouds obscured the sun, love faded and at the end she only desired serenity. Next came a rollicking piano tune, Musetta's song by Ruggero Leoncavallo, is a busy, happy melody. She is flirtatious, with laughing eyes. A more serious song of love and sacrifice is Lui's song from Puccini's Turandot. The set closed with the sentimental, bouncy, lyrical fireworks of La Serenata (Serenade) by Francesco Paolo Tosti. The passionate, extroverted song propels the world below to the window of his beloved.

Another of Ms. Fleming's talents was displayed in the last set of four Broadway hit tunes. Last summer she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in Rogers and Hammerstein's Carousel. In June she will debut in London's West End theater district in The Light in the Piazza (Lucas and Guettel). She regaled us with 'Till There Was You (Meredith Willson's The Music Man), Unusual Way (Maury Yeston's Nine), Love and Love Alone/Winter (Kander and Ebb's The Visit) and The Glamorous Life (Sondheim's A Little Night Music), a self-deprecatingly humorous song about the difficulties of the transient performer's existence and her susceptibility to the whims of the audience and critics. Anything but a glamorous life.

Generous with encores as usual, there were three of her “best songs": The beloved aria O, Mio Babbino Caro by Puccini; I Could Have Danced All Night (Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady) inviting the audience to sing along for the final chorus; and voicing a desire for better weather after it had rained all day, she finished with Summertime (Gershwin's Porgy and Bess). We were so high when we left the theater that the rain no longer mattered.