On long walks during the live performance hiatus brought about by the Covid pandemic, Renée Fleming conceived what became her album, ‘Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,’ juxtaposing vocal classics featuring imagery of nature with works by living composers that comment on what she describes as “our current, troubled relationship with the natural world.” The album’s subtitle refers to the present age in which humans have had a substantial impact on the earth’s climate and environment. After the album won the Grammy award for Best Classical Vocal Solo in 2023, she collaborated with the National Geographic Society to have them create a film designed to accompany and illustrate selections from the album. Shown on a large video screen behind the performers, the film contrasts pristine wilderness landscapes and seascapes that are rarely encountered by humans with the adverse impact on the planet and its wildlife from such human activities as drilling and burning fossil fuels. Fleming has given ‘Voice of Nature’ recitals along with pianists including Yannick Nézet-Séguin (who accompanied her on the album), Hartmut Höll, Gerald Martin Moore, Howard Watkins, Bradley Moore, and, as on this occasion, Inon Barnatan, who was a sensitive partner throughout the program.
Against the gorgeous National Geographic visual backdrop, Fleming sang an eclectic collection of songs that run a gamut of different genres, reflecting the diversity of her repertory now that her career is no longer primarily focused on opera performances. Her singing was spot-on stylistically, whether singing Hazel Dickens’s bluegrass song, ‘Pretty Bird’, Handel’s ode to the forests, ‘Care Selve’, or ‘Bailero’ from Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne – each was illustrated by scenes of natural beauty. Fleming used a microphone for ‘Pretty Bird’, as well as for her later selections from the realm of theater, film and pop music.
Nico Muhly’s ‘Endless Space’, commissioned by Fleming, expressly addresses the earth’s changing climate, contrasting seventeenth-century theologian Thomas Traherne’s visions of eternity with contemporary journalist Robinson Meyer’s pessimistic anticipation of fires, floods and plagues brought about by climate change – appropriately depicted on the video screen. Fleming delivered Muhly’s near-conversational declamations, atonal leaps and irregular rhythms with solid assuredness.
After singing ‘Our Finch Feeder’ from Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks – telling of how birds cling to the feeder as it sways in the wind – and a soulful rendition of Björk’s ‘All Is Full of Love’, Fleming stepped aside as Barnatan performed the fourth of Rachmaninov’s Six Moments Musicaux, appropriately underscoring the stormy images in the projected video with his forcefully virtuosic playing.
Fleming next offered ‘Twilight and Shadow’, a song by Howard Shore that she sang on the soundtrack of the film ‘Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’, To accompany the film’s final segments, she chose Kevin Puts’s ‘Evening’, also composed at her request. This is a setting of a Dorianne Laux poem that declares that “the land is disappearing beneath the sea” so that “we know we are doomed, done for, damned” — a pessimism that is somewhat belied by the soprano line soaring above Barnatan’s rippling accompaniment in the poem’s final stanzas. Fleming and Barnatan accompanied the scrolling film credits with two popular numbers: Curtis Green’s ‘Red Mountains Sometimes Cry’ and Burt Bacharach’s ‘What the World Needs Now’.
Returning to the stage following intermission, having exchanged her Green dress for a sparkling lilac and silver gown, Fleming began with two Fauré settings of poems by Paul Verlaine. Both ‘Clair de lune’ and ‘Mandoline’ depict dancing in the moonlight, calm and sad in the first song, joyful and animated in the latter. She concluded the set with an aria from Manon, one of her favorite roles, performed very much in character. Fleming has said that she most enjoys singing in French, and this was borne out by her lushly beautiful rendering of these Fauré and Massenet gems.
With Fleming taking an off-stage break, Barnatan offered a spectacularly virtuosic performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s rollicking Rondo Capriccioso in E, Op.14. He had the piano singing sweetly in the work’s opening arioso passage, after which the rondo theme contrasted brilliantly with the interspersed variations.
Fleming concluded with a medley from Kander and Ebb’s musical, The Visit, followed by lovely renditions of two traditional songs: ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘The Cuckoo’, the latter as arranged by Alan Fletcher. After an encore of ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Fleming asked the audience to join her in the refrain of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’.
The post Renée Fleming & Inon Barnatan at the Kravis Center, West Palm Beach – “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene” appeared first on The Classical Source.
