Renée Fleming Performs at Carnegie Hall

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 06 June 2023 13:59

Written by Jack Angstreich

Renée Fleming (R) with Evgeny Kissin at the piano. Photo by Chris Lee

At Carnegie Hall on the evening of Wednesday, May 31st, I had the exceptional privilege to attend a marvelous recital featuring the extraordinary, renowned soprano Renée Fleming, superbly accompanied by the celebrated pianist, Evgeny Kissin.

Fleming wore a fabulous burgundy gown and the event opened strongly with four excellentliederby Franz Schubert set to verse by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—he was the composer’s favorite poet, setting seventy songs to his works—or related figures. In her informative notes for the program, Janet E. Bedell provides useful background on the first of the night’s songs:

The poem for “Suleika I” was long attributed to Goethe, since it is to be found in his compilationWest-östlicher Divan, inspired by his fascination with the work of 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz (Suleika is one of Hafiz’s characters). We now know it was written by Marianne von Willemer, an Austrian actress who had a brief but intense relationship with Goethe.

Next was the brief “Die Vögel” of 1820 which is by the illustrious Friedrich von Schlegel, one of the founders of the Romantic movement in Germany for which Goethe was the most important precursor. Bedell comments instructively on the song that followed:

Poems from Goethe’s classic bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre—the chronicle of a young German’s educational wanderings in which, among other episodes, he meets a mysterious and winsome young girl, Mignon, who has been abducted from her Italian homeland and impressed into a band of traveling circus performers—inspired many Schubert lieder. Composed in 1826, the most famous of these “Lied der Mignon” is “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (“Only one who knows longing”), the last of six versions Schubert created for this haunting poem.

Finally, Fleming sung the 1821 revision of “Rastlose Liebe” (“Restless Love”) after Goethe’s poem.

The imposing balance of the first half of the program was devoted to outstanding music by Franz Liszt, beginning with two pieces for solo piano expertly played by Kissin. Of the first, Bedell writes:

Published in 1858, “Sposalizio” (“Marriage”) comes from Années de pèlerinage, deuxième année: Italie and was inspired by Raphael’s painting “The Marriage of the Virgin.”

And about the second she says, “The Valse oubliée No. 1 (Forgotten Waltz) is the most famous of four with that title composed in 1881.” About the composer’s songs, she explains:

He seemed to regard them as his personal responses to the poetry he loved and never promoted them heavily. Nevertheless, he composed more than 80 songs in five different languages between 1839 and his death in 1886. Though most are in German, this most cosmopolitan of artists also set poetry in French, Italian, English, and Hungarian.

Songwriting came naturally to Liszt, who counted many of Europe’s leading poets and novelists among his friends. His particular musical inspirations were Schubert (Liszt made many transcriptions of Schubert lieder) and Robert Schumann, whom he knew personally.

Liszt was a painstaking and highly innovative craftsman, who sometimes produced as many as three different versions of a song before he was satisfied. When he settled in Weimar in the 1850s, he found fault with many of his songs of the 1840s, saying: “My earlier songs are mostly inflatedly sentimental and frequently crammed too full in the accompaniment.” He revised most of them extensively, ruthlessly stripping them of excess, and even pruning his own piano parts so they were less virtuosic and more supportive handmaidens of the verse.

Fleming then admirably performed two more Goethe settings: “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (“Joyful and Sorrowful”) of 1844 and “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’” (“Over every mountaintop is peace”) of 1860, from a poem also set by Schubert. She concluded magnificently with “Im Rhein, im schönen Ströme” (“In the Rhine, in the fair stream”), with a lyric by Heinrich Heine which, according to Bedell, “portrays Cologne Cathedral and a beautiful sacred painting it contains.”

Comparable in intensity was the second half of the program—for which Fleming wore a spectacular, shimmering, orange-copper gown—which began with five works by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Kissin began by masterfully playing the transcription for piano of the exquisite “Lilacs” (from the composer’s Opus 21 of 1902) which was followed by the soprano performing the original song. Also bewitching was her version of “A Dream”—with a lyric by the esteemed Fyodor Sologub—from the Opus 38, Rachmaninoff’s last set of songs, from six texts by Russian symbolist poets.

Kissin then played two of the Morceaux de fantaisie: the Sérénade in B-flat minor and the Mélodie in E Major. Bedell provides some valuable background on these:

Written in 1892 when the composer was only 19 and just finishing his studies at the Moscow Conservatory, the five Morceaux de fantaisie were Rachmaninoff’s first published pieces for solo piano. He began the set with the dramatic Prélude in C-sharp minor, which was to become one of his most popular pieces, constantly demanded as an encore at his piano concerts. Needing more works for an upcoming concert, he rapidly added four companions. The last, the Sérénade in B-flat minor, was created as an expression of joy upon reading an article by Tchaikovsky in which the older composer praised him as one of Russia’s most outstanding young composers.

For the rest of his life, Rachmaninoff prized these little masterpieces, which he performed regularly and eventually recorded. In 1940, three years before his death, he chose to revise both the Mélodie in E Major and the Sérénade into the definitive versions performed today.

Fleming returned to the stage for two more superlative Liszt songs, both Victor Hugo settings. About the first, Bedell remarks:

Liszt created two versions of “S’il est un charmant gazon” (“If there is a charming lawn”), one around 1844 and the other in 1859; it is the first version performed on this program, which—typical for earlier Liszt songs—is longer and more elaborate in its vocal and piano parts, and adds an expansive coda.

Her rendition of the second, the famous “Oh! Quand je dors,” was maybe the apotheosis of the evening. She concluded the program enchantingly with two wonderful Henri Duparc songs: “Extase” and “Le manoir de Rosemonde,” the latter set to a lyric by the composer’s friend, Robert de Bonnières. Enthusiastic applause was rewarded with a thrilling encore: Schubert’s unforgettable “Ave Maria.”