Here is my Monday December 13 suntimes.com and Tuesday December 14 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Sunday afternoon December 12, 2010 Renée Fleming concert with the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra at the Civic Opera House.
Fleming basks in Lyric lovefest
BY ANDREW PATNER
Superstar soprano Renée Fleming performs Sunday with the Lyric Opera Orchestra, led by Andrew Davis. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times
Lyric Opera of Chicago and soprano Renée Fleming deservedly made international headlines last week when they announced that they would be teaming up to push and pull opera and its audiences in new directions in the years to come.
New works, an American musical theatre series, training of very young singers, and even new marketing and Internet efforts are all on the agenda for Fleming as Lyric’s first-ever official creative consultant. (Her new position will also see her in more such concerts as well as at least two appearances in lead roles in subscription series operas.)
Her five-year-term appointment was in the works since February. But the renowned American singer was back on the stage Sunday of the Civic Opera House for the first time in three seasons in a Lyric Subscriber Appreciation Concert, planned and announced well before she was invited to join Lyric’s leadership.
As is often the case with a Fleming appearance, the matinée concert, with music director Andrew Davis leading the Lyric Orchestra, was largely a lovefest with loyal Lyric supporters and Fleming fans filling the large house.
But there were some twists, both positive and less so. By choosing to introduce her songs and scene excerpts by microphone from the stage, Fleming allowed the audience to share in her genuine wit and keen intelligence, key aspects of her character that make her so attractive to Lyric’s board chieftains. With Fleming, what you see is who she really is.
But there also wasn’t that much from her to be seen and heard: just 62 minutes of singing in an almost three-hour event (including a 30-minute intermission). More than an hour was taken up by orchestra-only numbers. Some -- the “Méditation” from Massenet’s opera Thaïs featuring beautiful work from Lyric’s concertmaster Robert Hanford and the first suite of waltzes from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier -- were much better than others. And the orchestra frequently had uncharacteristically sloppy moments, entrances, and brass bobbles.
Fleming’s choices were an odd lot; I’m not sure I’d ever before heard a vocal program open with Desdemona’s Act 4 “Willow Song” and “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s Otello, which understandably found the singer still settling in vocally. But she was in wonderful voice after the Verdi. An often masterful interpreter of Mozart and Strauss, she offered neither. In fact, the only German on the program came in two Austro-Hungarian selections, the “Vilja Song” from Lehár’s The Merry Widow, and, as a superb final encore, "Marietta’s Song" from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.
We don’t usually associate Fleming with verismo opera, and certainly not onstage, but in the second half, she offered four back-to-back selections: Mimi’s Act 3 aria from Puccini’s La bohème, ariettas from Leoncavallo’s subsequent setting of the same story, the death scene from Giordano’s Fedora, and an aria from Riccardo Zandonai’s Carmen-like 1911 Conchita, all from Fleming’s 2009 CD of such material. The Leoncavallo and Zandonai were highlights that made a case for hearing more of these works. And as hackneyed as it has become as an encore, her “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi was one of the freshest and most richly sung heard from any singer in a long time.
There were “greatest hits” as well, to be sure: Blanche DuBois’ brief “Soft people” and her aria, “I want magic,” from André Previn’s 1998 A Streetcar Named Desire, written for Fleming; her longtime calling card, the “Song to the Moon” from Dvořák's Rusalka, sung in Czech, and, for French repertoire, the Act 2 recitative and aria from Thaïs. All of this, though, sometimes made the concert seem more of a pops event than a serious and tailored program that the singer is obviously capable of creating.
In addition to the beautifully delivered Puccini and Korngold, Fleming gave one other encore, a truncated version of her take on Leonard Cohen’s 1984 “Hallelujah” from her current release of reimagined indie rock songs, Dark Hope. This plushly orchestrated cover seemed to owe as much to the late Jeff Buckley’s hit take than to Cohen. Another anticipated Dark Hope encore, “Soul and Body” by Death Cab for Cutie (classicos, please note: that’s really the name of the band), was cut. Perhaps overtime was ticking?
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