"Renée Fleming — Bel
Canto"
Bellini:
"Ah!.se
una volta sola ... Ah! Non credea
mirarti ...
Ah! non giunge
uman pensiero" from La
sonnambula
"Ah!
S'io
potessi dissipar ... Col sorriso
d'innocenza ...
Oh sole! Ti vela di tenebre oscure" from Il pirata
Donizetti:
"Abbracciami ... Il piu
tenero suon d'arpa
morende ...
Ah! non sai
qual prestigio si cela" from Maria
Padilla
"M'odi, ah m'odi, io
non t'imploro ... Figlio!
figlio! ...
Ola, qualcuno! ... Era desso il figlia mio" from Lucrezia
Borgia
Rossini:
"Bel raggio lusinghier ...
Dolce pensiero di quell'istante" from
Semiramide
"D'Amor al dolce impero ...
Gli augei tra fronde e
fronde ...
La fresca
eta sen fugge ... Ah! Si, godete amanti" from Armida
Renée
Fleming (soprano)
Kristine Jepson (mezzo-soprano)
Coro del Maggio
Musicale Fiorentino
Orchestra of St. Luke's
Patrick Summers
(conductor)
Decca
Bel canto tends to be career-making repertoire for young singers
— the sheer athleticism is so thrilling that it can't help attracting
attention. More often than not, though, bel canto singing serves as a
platform: rising singers usually make the transition into mainstream lyric
roles, particularly as their voices become bigger and less agile. Maria Callas
and Beverly Sills both stuck with bel canto, though Sills admitted that
her choice of roles took a decade off her career and some opera pundits believe
Callas would have added years to hers had she traded Bellini for something like
Schubert.
Now we have Renée Fleming, solidly in mid-career and a lyric singer capable of handling Eva in Die Meistersinger, but with some astonishing bel canto performances in her past. Daringly, perhaps, she has returned to that repertory, recording scenes from Bellini's La sonnambula, Donizetti's Maria Padilla, Rossini's Semiramide and Bellini's Il pirata, among others — music that offers no place to hide the tiniest technical imperfections or signs of vocal aging. Certain things can't be faked in the recording studio — and Fleming has reason not to try, given that the Metropolitan Opera is mounting the rarely heard vocal showcase Il pirata for her in October-November 2002. It'll be immensely scrutinized; she wants to be ready.
And is she?
Yes. This disc is the best bel canto anthology in years, but with an asterisk referring to the inevitable Maria Callas comparisons. For now, let's stay away from those.
Fleming's program is intelligently planned, mixing the familiar and the obscure. Serious bel canto isn't all gothic mad scenes, and Fleming's program encompasses the ecstatic (Semiramide) and even the playful (Rossini's Armida). Vocally, her coloratura that lacks the pinpoint accuracy that we've heard from some mezzo-sopranos lately, but it's still rock-solid, and infused with dramatic meaning at every turn. Along with all that, Fleming delivers something that's been missing from these big soprano roles in recent years. But in doing so, she reveals the cruel reality of bel canto: singers can pour their entire beings into this music, but it still demands more.
One of the first things we're all taught about bel canto is that the score is a blueprint rather than the totality — the composer supplies the notes, with the performer expected to provide the emotional life — but that's only the beginning of the creative challenges involved in this repertory. In terms of plot, these operas are about titans of society tortured by matters of life and death. That narrative element allows claims to be made for these works as high art; in fact, bel canto opera dramatizes grand and noble theatrical gestures with crowd-pleasing music that's so formulaic that there's not a huge stylistic difference, to 21st-century ears, between the writing for the playful Armida and that for the sleepwalking Anina of La sonnambula. So this repertory demands not only world-champion vocal equipment, but also an actress creative enough to use her music as one of many tools to creating a character, to find dramatic purpose in a single chromatic twist.
Montserrat Caballé, for one, succeeded on the visceral power of her voice, on simply being the characters (or, rather, letting them be her) rather than attempting to enact them. Fleming, even more than Sills before her, attempts to portray; she builds her characters with word-painting in an approach not unlike Lieder singing. Her theatrical instincts are sound, and her execution imaginative; you could even compare her to a method actress doing soap opera. In the final Il Pirata scene, for instance, the heroine observes everyday things, which take on hugely magnified significance in her eyes, and Fleming projects this brilliantly. Best of all is the Lucrezia Borgia scene: the heroine is going mad over the death of her son, an emotional state that Fleming enters with chilling realism, though without slighting the music's blatant theatricality. In the final moments, Fleming delivers the concluding coloratura flourish with an explosive sense of surprise that's both moving and dazzling. She masters the art of finding dire truths in those formulaic music and texts. (Sadly, her all-too-literal conductor, Patrick Summers, fails to do so along with her.)
For all her strengths, however, Fleming doesn't escape unscathed. Though she avoids Roberto Alagna's occasional high-concept affectations, you're sometimes aware of calculation, of using a bag of tricks. Every so often, her creamy head voice hovers over a passage a spilt second too long, or you're aware that a melancholy downward portamento has been turning up in a few passages too many. But what tricks! Fleming's death-haunted moments, which are so often written in the very lowest notes of the soprano range, have a chilling strength that sometimes eclipses Callas.
Uh-oh. There's that name again.
Maria Callas delivered psychological details, as Fleming does, but the older
singer had a unique ability to make you care about — even to
worry about — any character she portrayed, thanks to the
profound sense of sadness that she conveyed with so little apparent effort. Of
course, that particular sort of charisma came with extra-musical baggage that
made comic roles pretty much off limits for her (and shortened her career to
boot). But with Callas having gone down that particular path, nobody else needs
to — her recordings are as much cautionary tale as artistic triumph.
It's been easy to see other singers in this repertoire as Callas stopgaps.
Fleming, by contrast, redefines bel canto without neuroses. There
are losses in that, but the gains — the prospect of many more years of
Renée Fleming, for one — are well worth it.
