Now this is more like it
POSTED at
4:22 PM
26 October 2007
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23 Comments:
La Cieca,
So you gave in and posted a good clip!... Don't let those Reee-neee lovers push you around, lol.
Interesting piece, btw. And for once, it works for her, and us. It's great to hear colorfully sung German music too. Enough of that white, blah sound in German music.
Is it just me, or is she copying Gheorgious with the "I just got back from the Mediterranean" look? Like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLnschMlaPk
Thank you, La Cieca, for posting this.
Absolutely stunning! Heartfelt, serene, and deeply moving.
This is my main complaint about Renee. She can sing like this...which is lovely and quite often opts to sing like Bing Crosby. She needs some good advice and from someone she trusts.
Why oh why is she wasting her wonderful voice on that Can Belto rubbish when she should be singing Korngold, Strauss, Schreker and stuff like that?
Die Kathrin is a wonderful opera and has a very nice lyrische tenor role too.
Brava, La Cieca, for this. It's lovely. Brava.
This is lovely singing. It was refreshing to hear it after listening to Guleghina's dreadful performance as Lady Macbeth on Sirius tonight.
Is this mass hysteria lolol there's absolutely no challenge for soprano here, what might be the highest note in this piece? Her interpretation is tedious.
Choosing this even tessitura is perhaps very smart considering the current state of her voice. Of course what she'd rather sing (but can't) is the real difficult challenges like Norma, Bolena, Lucrezia or even, God forbid, Lucia. She knows that's how Callas, Sutherland, Caballé and Sills became legends, definitely not through Korngold.
But dearest TK Logan: When Callas et al. began to cultivate the roles you mention those operas also were not the star vehicles people wanted to hear. Walter Legge was once considered a crackpot for recording that music with Callas when there were not many known customers for it.
With the attitude you express, the repertory would stay very small indeed.
And I'm sure I'm not the only person who, though long having to be dragged to hear the poor woman, would gladly go to hear her sing some of the repertory you speak of so slightingly.
that's how i felt when i first heard her ... sheer gorgeous sound ... and her emotional life has deepened so much ... here's to renee fleming, the expert interpreter of german music ... may she do much, much more of this material!!!
Although Sieglinde thinks parterre box has been hacked, I liked it.
Cher TK: Of course Fleming sang other things at that concert, most of them more technically difficult than this piece. La Cieca selected this clip because here Fleming is in her element -- the timbre and (maybe even more important) the slightly artificial sentimentality of the piece are a perfect fit for the singer. It is a gorgeous voice, very well preserved, and I think the music speaks to her. I can't say that about, oh, 95% of the music ever written for soprano voice -- in my opinion, Fleming's range of taste is pretty narrow. But within that range, she's pretty awesome.
What I would love to hear from her would be a recital of German and American songs with an accompanist/collaborator she respected and feared enough that she would be on her best behavior throughout. But I'm not holding my breath.
when oh when is she singing elsa? methinks her voice would be fantastic for that role...
and korngold definately needs to be revived, apart from anne sofie von otter, not many singers have championed his things the way they deserve.
i think in the germanic repertoire renee has not many peers nowadays. dont crucify me, it is a personal opinion!
Ain't it a pretty voice?
This is the unstylized old Fleming with the beauties that once promised so much. I have long noticed that in German and Russian music (even French) she is more careful, less WAYWARD than in Italian, where she seems to feel it's just a vocalise and she can do whatever she damn well pleases. This is stylish; her Italian roles are stylized out of all relation to the composer's intent.
I'd pay to hear her in German roles; I'd pay to avoid her in Italian ones. Her Traviata was dead on arrival and her Lucrezia at CH justified La Scala's reaction to it.
Thanks, Cieca, you rascal!
-- Hans Lick
To this listener there is nothing revelatory about Fleming in these three minutes of vocalise. In others words, the voice is hardly anything one could remotely consider beautiful. The voice, the style has none of the classical composure most of the music she likes to sing demands and deserves. The overall aural effect is one of gloss devoid of meaning or importance, the equivalent of looking at the cover of People magazine. Or, to put it differently: vulgar.
La Cieca, you're BRILLIANT!!! Spot-on... Yes, this is EXACTLY what Fleming should be singing. Who cares if there are no notes in extremis? Not I... I'd rather hear her in her element than attempting to stretch herself into territory where her voice does not naturally wander...
Your mention of American music reminds of Marilyn Horne's all-American concert back in the 90s. That was one of the first times I heard Fleming and loved her. I'll never forget her "Knoxville" at Ravinia in the late 90s - gorgeous in its utter simplicity. Then along came the new Millennium and her Met Susannah and her newly-found Southern accent.
Well, I hope this augurs a return to what she does best - gorgeous lyric line, impeccable breath control, no notes about high B natural (B flat, even). IMHO, her most persuasive work has been in Mozart and Strauss, where her voice never is called on to sing a high C, let alone higher.
I won't name the moron of whom I speak. I am just appalled at this high note queen idiocy. The ONLY singer who could manage ALL the prima ottocento rep equally well from a vocal point of view was Sutherland, who was spectacular. Callas only sang some of the roles -- and yes she should have recorded The Three Queens complete rather than Mimi, Butterfly and Turandot. And in any case by '59 (to be kind) her capacity to do vocal justice to this music was gone.
I've mentioned before here and will mention again, Sills does not belong in this company, and I include Fleming. She lacked a strong, firm core to her sound, and the tone had a granular quality, devoid of sweetness. No one who knows what good acting is could sit through her hammy carrying on and take it seriously.
Caballe did have a break through with Lucrezia and did a fine Devereux the next year but in the main the best samples of her 'art' were her recitals. She gave a party and everyone was invited. She might try a 'serious' first part, but usually she hadn't learned it or warmed up. In the second part she would sing selection after selection not always stylishly but with gorgeous tone and that strange talent called a 'song sense' (she could put music over). In complete performance she was wildly uneven, frequently not well prepared and often silly in her behavior. Her coloratura skills were fairly modest for this rep and didn't extend to a trill, or real velocity with good articulation (Sills had that but Sutherland also had five times more volume, richness of timbre and impact in the lower range).
Finally the notion that Lucrezia is more than a snore is preposterous -- Caballe's few long pianissimi moments are also the best moments in a score thinner than Legally Blond, a fact about a lot of Donizetti.
No, I don't think Korngold was a 'great' composer, I talked of the pastiche school earlier, but a lot of his writing is very winning and his writing for soaring soprano is wonderful. I adore Schreker like Henry Holland, though I doubt Fleming has quite the style for complete roles, there are selections it would be great to hear (act two, scene 2 of Die Gezeichneten would make a great 20 minutes on one of her CDs). And these are real composers, whose work has a lot more interest than the vocal line of the prima donna (I would add Braunfels to this list). As for Strauss I have not seen her quite make the connection with The Marschiallin or Arabella, but she'd be a wonderful Danae (in the last act).
This namenlose schmuck is a musical ignoramus and fool.
"She quite often sings like Bing Crosby."
And what, praytell, would be wrong like that?
Most singers should dream about being able to sing as well as Bing Crosby.
Sometimes the dumb or uninformed remarks around here are, well, remarkable.
Remarkable? Even more remarkable is the idea that Il Crosby's vocal style, one brilliantly calibrated to the microphone, has anything whatever to do with opera.
Far from unthinking, reflexive Fleming hater, IIRC La Cieca has always maintained that she has the ability to be a truly great singer.
But, too often, she sings inappropriate roles (she should never get within 5 miles of bel canto or anything written by an Italian for that matter) or gives bizarre mannered performances with worldclass lapses in basic taste (I could have shrieked like a wounded hyena all night; escape from cold mountain being two of the scarier examples).
Mozart, Strauss and his rough contemporaries should be her stock in trade.
This work may not be great art, but it's a wonderful, idiomatic performance (possibly better than the piece deserves) and absolutely the sort of thing she should be doing.
"Most singers should dream about being able to sing as well as Bing Crosby"
Well his Violetta was maybe underestimated, but his Carmen phoned in and don't get me started on his Salome....
"But, too often, she sings inappropriate roles"
That's actually not true. If you go to the Met Database, you'll see that in her 16 year career at the Met she's sung almost exclusively Mozart, Strauss and Massenet. The only bel canto role in that time was the Pirata four years ago (also the Lucrezia outside the Met).
The only other Italian roles she sings are Violetta and Desdemona, and IMO Desdemona is one of her best roles. She sings no Puccini at all.
So there seems to me to be a sort of hysterical overreaction to her singing the wrong rep.
And, as far as the examples of bad taste you mention. Well, it's crossover. I think we can all think of some pretty bad crossover down through the ages.
Yes, there has been a lot of bad crossover-- Nilsson's "I Cout Haf Danzd All Night" and Miss Price's historically awful 'What I Did For Love' are as bad in their own way as anything Miss Fleming has done.
But that doesn't excuse Miss Fleming or her tendency to bring that mess with her to a Traviata performance.
Miss Fleming is the girl with curl in the middle of her forehead. Listen to the other Proms excerpt on YouTube where she sings the 'Ich ging zu ihn' from Korngold's 'DWdHeliane'. No swooning, sighing or crooning... if one can sing this way, why would one choose to do otherwise?
I agree with La C about the rep that is good for Miss F; and would add that there's nothing wrong with being very good at one thing-- it's a hell of a lot more than most people can claim.
Meretrice I. d'Oscena
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