MUSIC REVIEW : Norman Opens Season, Grandly, Unevenly

Jessye Norman, who opened the concert season at Ambassador Auditorium on Wednesday with a little help from some friends, doesn’t have to think small. She is a grandiose woman with a grandiose talent.

She exults in the simple joy of divahood. She basks in automatic, delirious adulation before she can utter a tone. She turns easy essays into complex dramas. She strikes lofty poses and sculpts pretty phrases in the air.

Sometimes she offers revelations. Sometimes she resorts to distortions. Either way, she is interesting.

In a day when so many singers are content to be bland technicians, and not necessarily deft technicians at that, she remains an undoubted presence. She exhibits character, and she has ideas.

She commands the stage instantly. She seizes the music, dares the listener not to surrender.

That does not mean, however, that she turns everything she attempts into sonic gold. On this occasion, she seemed tired and out of sorts during the first half of the program.

Wherever possible, she opted for low keys and slow tempos. Her tone emerged a bit raspy. High climaxes were tentative. Pitch became precarious, breath insecure.

Cleopatra’s “Piangero” served as a ponderous Handelian prelude for four Strauss Lieder submerged in lugubrious Sprechgesang . The intimate sensuality of four Duparc songs proved more congenial, but even here one could have hoped for more shimmer and better legato.

Vocal matters improved after intermission. In Ravel’s “Sheherazade,” Norman’s soprano--or is it really an extended mezzo-soprano?--sounded lush, the expressive allure natural. Linda Chesis added exotic flute colors in the composer’s own chamber-music transcription. Here, as elsewhere, Dan Saunders provided robust yet sensitive piano accompaniment.

Falla’s “Siete canciones populares espanolas” closed the official portion of the program. Pepe Romero had arranged the original piano part for guitar, a virtuosic feat. He performed with authentic elan.

The necessary reduction in tone and scope tended, alas, to trivialize the basic passions. Under the circumstances, Norman had two unsatisfactory choices: She could either scale down her solos or overpower the guitarist.

For most of the cycle, she held back. She sang beautifully, flirted both with the line and with her gallant collaborator, pointed the rhetoric with telling nuances, but muted the flamboyant impact.

Then, in the final “Polo,” she let rip with chesty snarls and marvelous growls. In the process, she brought down the house, and all but blasted Romero off the stage.

The three encores included two habaneras: Ravel’s sinuous “Vocalise,” exquisitely performed, and Carmen’s inevitable cliche, unintentionally caricatured. Norman--whose controversial recording of Bizet’s greatest hit has just been released--indulged in slides, sighs, whispers, yelps, lyrical evasions and other snail’s pace mannerisms that bordered on the grotesque.

The would-be seduction number was followed by the inevitable benediction, “He’s Got The Whole World in His Hands.” Standing ovations and floral tributes were forgone conclusions.