A Recital of Her Attributes

After years of slowly working her way to the top, of carefully developing her voice and artistry, Renee Fleming has arrived. This is her season, with new productions at the Metropolitan Opera, including the hot-ticket “Marriage of Figaro,” with Cecilia Bartoli and Bryn Terfel. She was Blanche DuBois in Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which was recently televised and is now available on CD from Deutsche Grammophon. She is featured in a stellar new recording of Dvorak’s “Rusalka” and also has a new CD of American arias, “I Want Magic.” A previous recital disc is aptly titled “The Beautiful Voice.”

Now Fleming begins the year with a national recital tour, alighting Wednesday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. There was no question of her stardom. The audience was large, quick with the bravos and so eager to applaud, Fleming begged for a little restraint between songs.

Fleming has one of the truly magnificent voices of our time. But the season hasn’t been quite as happy as she might have hoped. Opera, curiously, makes Blanche seem less operatic rather than more, although both Previn’s music and Fleming’s performance reveal greater nuance upon close listening to the CD than could be gathered from the stage at the San Francisco Opera premiere. A marriage breakup was the reason she gave for bowing out of the Met’s new “La Traviata.”

Vocally, however, there was little to worry about Wednesday night. Fleming sounded confidently opulent from the start in Schubert songs, and only got more dazzling as the long evening wore on. She does not have the largest voice in the operatic universe, nor the most focused enunciation (so few words in some songs were intelligible that it was hard to tell what verse she was singing), but she does have incomparably gorgeous tone production, a wonderful control of color and buoyant phrasing.

She also has a sharp intelligence, and she seemed nearly as keen on selecting worthy poetry as music for her program of songs. The first half was devoted to texts by Goethe, with the twist of hearing different Romantic-period composers’ versions of the poet’s heroines. There were Schubert’s and Mendelssohn’s “Suleika”; Schubert and Glinka’s settings of “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” But such comparisons are not always instructive, and Mendelssohn and Glinka paled musically next to the intensity of Schubert’s drama, or the masterful mini-dramas about a third Goethe heroine, Mignon, in four songs by Hugo Wolf.

It amounted to scattershot Goethe, especially given Fleming’s tendency to focus mostly on broad dramatic characterizations through tone and feeling than on words. She can be a fine singer of lieder when she scales down and has a precise accompanists, such as conductor Christoph Eschenbach. Here, with Helen Yorke, a fluid accompanist of little character, Fleming seemed to lack interpretive focus.

After intermission, the poets were first Verlaine (Debussy’s “Ariettes Oubliees”) and James Joyce (Barber’s “Nuvoletta”). The Debussy was beautiful, warm and sensitive, but with the composer’s and poet’s rich sensuality held somewhat back. “Nuvoletta,” though, was a horror, what with Barber’s blandly saccharine sentimentalizing of Joyce’s inventive language, and Fleming treating wordplay with contrived apple-pie cuteness.

But then came the sappy texts and rich flowing music of five Strauss songs (and two more among the five encores) along with an encore of Dvorak’s “Song to the Moon,” from “Rusalka,” and Fleming became pure, gorgeous, all-consuming, sensuous voice--and she was fabulous. For Gershwin’s “Summertime” and an Ellington tune, the other encores, she was also fabulous, a talented jazz singer but a self-conscious one.

Fleming is a great singer, but she could become an even greater one were she to achieve a consistent wholeness between voice and mind, to make us believe both were one.