ROUGE ET CHARBON

Renée Fleming (photo by Andrew Eccles)

We live in an age in which opera singers are expected to be beautiful and glamorous. An adoring audience was well rewarded last night at Carnegie Hall when the beautiful and glamorous soprano Renée Fleming was joined by the equally beautiful and glamorous collaborative pianist Olga Kern. We wondered whether we were at a fashion show or a vocal recital.  Let us get the visuals out of the way first.

For the first half of the program, Ms. Fleming appeared in a striking charcoal gown with a voluminous skirt and black elbow length gloves, the fingers of which were adorned with rings (bling credited to Ann Ziff for Tamsen Z) with Ms. Kern in a skin-tight strapless red gown that hugged her gorgeous figure right down to the knees at which point it flared out into a fishtail.  For the second half of the program, the singer wore a far more flattering red satin gown with matching stole, while Ms. Kern became the wearer of the charcoal, a stunning gown with lines similar to the one she wore for the first half. We were surprised not to find designer credit in the program.

And now we may move on from the arresting visual images to the aural impressions. The highlight of Ms. Fleming's performance was, for us, her third encore--"O, mio babbino caro" from Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. If she never performed in that opera she certainly should have! The aria was delivered with all the passion Puccini wrote and we left Carnegie Hall singing it to ourselves, singing it all the way home. Ms. Fleming seemed far more comfortable with opera than she had been with lieder, although there were several highlights that lifted the evening out of the mundane.

The main problem was the unwelcome presence of the music stand which hampered her connection with the audience. She was not constantly relying on the score but kept it to one side. Still, every occasional glance down and every page turn broke the delicate thread that connects the audience to the singer and the song. 

Ms. Fleming announced that this was the first time she had performed Robert Schumann's magnificent song cycle Frauenliebe und leben and it seemed to us as if she were not quite comfortable with it. It was an appropriate choice of material, coming on the heels of International Women's Day and it is one of our favorite pieces of music; but the performance seemed flat and lacking in variety of color. The performance picked up toward the end with the sweet "Süsser Freund, du blickest" in which the young married woman reveals her pregnancy to her husband.  The final song "Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan" is a real heartbreaker but we were less moved than we generally are by this incredible work.

A group of songs by Rachmaninoff fared better and seemed to be a more comfortable fit for Ms. Fleming's lush instrument. We loved the heart rending "Sing not to me, beautiful maiden", filled as it is with depths of homesickness. The gentle "The Waterlily" was short and sweet, while the passionate "Spring Waters" seemed seasonally appropriate.

We particularly enjoyed Ms. Kern's piano solo. Rachmaninoff himself arranged "Lilacs" for solo piano and she imbued her performance with delicate filigrees of sound that took us right into Central Park's Lilac Walk which we visit every April.

Ms. Kern had another solo during the second half of the program and she dazzled us with "Feux d'artifice" from Debussy's second book of Préludes from 1913. One might say that the performance was filled with fireworks!

The set of Debussy songs was well performed by the two lovely ladies. We always love the langorous "C'est l'extase" but the final song "Chevaux de bois" was our favorite with its dynamic variety and excitement, all of which was captured by the two artists.

The final set comprised five songs by Patricia Barber and we would agree with Ms. Fleming that these are art songs; be they jazz or blues, they surely deserved to be on the program, even though they are not our taste. Ms. Fleming seemed very comfortable with them and appeared to be having a fine time, especially in the final song in which the singer gives the boot to a man who has served his purpose.

As encores we heard "Danny Boy" with Ms. Kern providing a most interesting accompaniment, and "Shall We Dance" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I  now playing on Broadway.

And then....to waft us homeward, the glorious "O, mio babbino caro".

(c) meche kroop

C'EST CHIC--C'EST GREEK

Eleftheria Arvanitaki

There is music in her soul and music in her name.  Just try saying it out loud--Eleftheria Arvanitaki.  This international recording star managed--with her warm voice and embracing gestures--to create a sensation of intimacy in the huge Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall.

It is difficult to believe that Ms. A. has been recording for 30 years.  She does not appear to be much over 30 at the present time and uses her stunning Mediterranean looks to good advantage.  She is slim and dressed simply in a way that said "I am here to share my music", rather than "Look at me and how glamorous I am".  It was all about the music!

There is no doubt that the fans hanging over the railing of the balcony were as involved as the elderly man who was dancing up and down the aisles of the orchestra.  The ushers gave up trying to warn people not to take pictures.  Fans stood up, yelled and screamed with their arms overhead applauding wildly, unmindful of the folks sitting behind them.  No one protested. That's the kind of evening it was.

There is no audience like an audience of expatriates and a good guess was that half the audience was Greek and the other half were Greek for the night.  They came to hear Ms. Arvanitaki sing the kind of music she has championed--rebetiko--a fusion of Mediterranian, Greek and Middle-Eastern.  Some of the music was contemporary and some was more along classical lines.  But whatever she sang, she was totally immersed in the music and her connection with the audience.

There was no program and we relied on the Greek friend who accompanied us to tell us what the songs were about.  Like all song, the subject is usually love--romantic love and love of country.  All seemed to spring from the soul.

There were seven musicians onstage--there was a piano and a keyboard, a bass viol, drums of both classical and ethnic variety, a soprano sax, a clarinet, a flute, and several varieties of stringed instruments--guitar, bouzouki, lute, and mandolin; later in the program Ms. Arvanitaki was joined by the well-known Armenian-American composer and oud virtuoso Ara Dinkjian who dazzled with his oud  solo and played another instrument with which we are unfamiliar; it looked like a banjo but did not sound like one.

Harmonies were rather basic in most of the songs, as was the rhythm.  Occasionally those two elements seemed far more complex and novel.  To our 19th c. ears, the amplification of voice and seven instruments was overwhelming. Unlike the thousands of fans in attendance we longed to hear Ms. Arvanitaki unamplified with only a bouzouki or piano as accompaniment.  We find that amplification dulls the colors of a voice.

Nonetheless, it was a wildly entertaining evening and we envied the man who was able to get up and dance.

©meche kroop