06-03-2025
A magnificent return for Renée Fleming, plus the best of March's classical concerts
Renée Fleming/ Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆
Since her retirement from the operatic stage was announced in 2017 the great American soprano Renée Fleming has had more comebacks than the Spice Girls. She's played Pat Nixon in John Adams' Nixon in China, taken the lead role in a brand-new opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the scene of her greatest triumphs, and recorded an album of song which carried off a Grammy Award. And she insists she never said she was retiring anyway.
Now in her mid-60s, Fleming is throwing most of her energies into music-and-health initiatives and rations her appearances carefully. Her performance last night with the London Philharmonic Orchestra was billed as 'An Evening with Renée Fleming', but most of the evening was actually taken up with orchestral highlights from Wagner's Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger, each flowing into the next in a rapturous phantasmagoria. On the podium was young German conductor Thomas Guggeis, who seemed over-controlling and somewhat rigid in the purely orchestral pieces, but was a wonderfully sensitive accompanist to Fleming – which was what really mattered. As for Fleming herself, she sang only the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss, and one lovely encore. It seemed a small thing to fly across the Atlantic for.
But it was worth it. Fleming's voice may not have the power it once had, and there were times, especially in the refulgent last song when she was overpowered by the orchestra. But the exquisite sheen is still there, and that magnificent control of the melodic line, which never wavered. And above all the connection with the emotional heart of Strauss's masterpiece. Strauss's songs distil a lifetime of experience and his tempestuous 60-year marriage to his beloved Pauline, in feelings of gratitude and an acceptance of mortality. Nature acts as the mirror of these feelings, beginning with a rush of ecstasy in Spring, and darkening towards the sunset of the final song.
Fleming caught that transition beautifully. The ending of September where she sang of falling leaves was perhaps the evening's most blissful moment – a feeling amplified by the lovely sunset-glow horn solo from John Ryan. In the third song where the words speak of sinking into sleep, it was a smiling, eyes-closed, almost-inaudible form of oblivion Fleming offered. We were back in the world of Wagner's Liebestod (Love-Death) from Tristan and Isolde, which the LPO and Guggeis had shrewdly played as a curtain-raiser to set us in the right mood. Though Fleming's sound was predominantly radiant it could take on a dark intensity, which rung out with startling force on the very first word of the first song – 'dämmrigen', half-light.
Lovely though all this was, the evening's best moment vocally actually came in the encore, Strauss's rapturous, quiet Morgen (morning) where the lighter orchestration meant that Fleming's exquisite small voice could float freely, and the words were properly audible. As Fleming departed with a friendly smile, the applause wasn't the wild kind that often greets a diva's fleeting appearance. It was a heartfelt acknowledgement of real artistry.
