When superstar soprano Renée Fleming last performed a Twin Cities recital in 2016, it felt a lot like goodbye. She’d recently announced her retirement from the opera stage. and who knew how long it would be before she stopped performing song recitals, too?
But it turns out that she wasn’t done with opera, for she accepted a role in Kevin Puts’ adaptation of “The Hours” with the Metropolitan Opera in 2022. Meanwhile, she lent her voice to another project, putting together a collection of songs from past and present that could act as something of a song cycle about humans’ relationship to the earth.
It became an album called “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,” taking the name of the era of history during which humans have existed. And she decided to take the show on the road, presenting songs on the subject while video imagery from the National Geographic Society shone on a screen above her and pianist Inon Barnatan.
The two presented it at St. Paul’s Ordway Concert Hall Friday night, and it proved a very enjoyable performance that felt far more like a team effort than your typical vocal recital. Rather than hog the spotlight, Fleming leaned upon Barnatan’s expert interpretive skills, even allowing him a pair of showstopping solo turns. And then there was the enormousness of the video behind her, which featured one awe-inspiring shot after another. Finally, she encouraged the audience to lend their voices to encores on both halves of the program.
While Fleming’s voice isn’t as lustrous and creamy as it once was, at age 66, she can still send spirits soaring with one of those spine-tingling high notes that helped earn her the nickname of “The Voice.” Her lower register may be more unsteady these days, and her choice of repertoire less Herculean, but she’s accrued much wisdom about how to structure a program and get an audience into her corner with charismatic showmanship.
When the material was rooted in pop or folk tunes, Fleming employed a microphone, but she set it aside when the fare was more traditionally classical, such as an aria from George Frideric Handel’s “Atalanta” or a lovely pair of songs by French romantic Reynaldo Hahn that seemed squarely in Fleming’s wheelhouse. Yet the mic served her well in helping create haunting echoes on a song she sang for one of the “Lord of the Rings” films and something by Icelandic pop-rocker Bjork, “All is Full of Love.”
Her stage presence remains so luminescent that there was no danger of Barnatan stealing the show out from under her with his magnificent solo turns on the fourth of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Moments Musicaux and Earl Wild’s Art Tatum-esque takes on George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” and “I Got Rhythm.”
While such newer pieces as Nico Muhly’s “Endless Space” and Puts’ “Evening” didn’t seem good fits for the current quality of her voice, she earned the audience’s affection by evoking the artistry of Dionne Warwick on “What the World Needs Now” and Julie Andrews on “The Sound of Music.” And Fred Kander’s adaptation of a letter from a Civil War-era soldier to his wife proved the evening’s most emotionally affecting song.
