You Want Vocal Versatility? You Got It

America asks the world from its leading lyric sopranos. A gorgeous voice is a necessary start, but only that. We expect versatility. A true American comfortably sings the American vernacular--jazz, Broadway standards, pop, new art music--as well as French, Italian and German opera and art song. The same beautiful voice, moreover, should be as able to enliven the troubled queens of Baroque opera as the torchy heroines of contemporary American opera, to say nothing of everything in between. Those sopranos who are not physically attractive, who lack stage presence or who engage in diva behavior need not apply. We want sweethearts, and with brains.

Were there one such singer, we would have reason to be astonished. In fact, we have three--Barbara Bonney, Renee Fleming and Dawn Upshaw (to take them in alphabetical order)--and they have new solo CDs to prove it.

Upshaw’s latest Nonesuch disc, “Angels Hide Their Faces,” with music by Purcell and Bach, is the very model for an imaginative recital, a recording that is devastatingly beautiful to listen to yet also has a startling dramatic premise. First, to get a listener in the mood for something out of the ordinary, there is the cover--a reproduction of a shocking 1903 painting, “Wounded Angel,” by Hugo Simberg, an angel with bandaged head carried on a stretcher by two grim, mean-looking boys in bleak landscape. It illustrates a strange musical program, in which Bach’s solo liturgical cantata, “My Heart Swims in Blood,” is surrounded by Purcell songs of life, love and blessing.

In her live recitals, Upshaw sometimes enacts the Bach cantata in a dramatic context devised by Peter Sellars. Writhing on the ground, suicidal in the recognition of sensual sin, the soprano gradually hears the call of God and rises to redemption. On the CD, sensual Purcell gives us the before and after, the utter delight in the senses and the calmness of transcendence.

Sounding ever fresh and lively, Upshaw brings to Baroque music the same pure, clean tone that makes her a revelation in Vernon Duke songs, the same range of colors that makes her ideal for composers such as Messiaen or Kaija Saariaho, the same expressivity that makes her a seductive Mozartean. To hear her sing Purcell’s “Music for a While,” which opens the CD, is to be hooked. Yet in the Bach cantata, she also reveals an arresting dramatic intensity and power.

There is no conductor, just chamber music accompaniment--cellist Myron Lutzke and harpsichordist/organist Arthur Hass are her colleagues for Purcell; an ensemble of seven joins her for Bach--and this serves Upshaw well. Here is an example of what a great American singer, one never afraid to be herself and one who never repeats herself, can do.

Bonney also turns to Purcell on “Fairest Isle,” but in a very different context. She is an American tourist in 17th century Britain, visiting a group of Purcell numbers, along with songs by John Dowland, Thomas Campion, Thomas Morely and William Byrd. And she has mostly British experts in the period as her guide--the lutenist Jacob Heringman and the viol group Phantasm in the earlier music; the Academy of Ancient Music conducted by Christopher Hogwood in the Purcell.

Bonney has a harder, more diamond-like tone than Upshaw, and in the Purcell, dramatically convincing as it is, the Academy of Ancient Music seems to push that hardness into steel. But, like Upshaw, she represents an American lack of pretense, an utter directness of diction and musical expression, which also makes her disc downright attractive. (Her American English has caused amusing comment in the British press.) And at her best, in the songs by Dowland and Campion accompanied only by lute, she is almost like a folk singer. “I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die,” she sings, and each word sounds a perfect expression of its meaning to a lover awaiting her love. Think of Woody Guthrie with a voice from which no angel would have to hide its face.

“Night Songs” is Fleming’s first collaboration with the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a CD of songs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that are haunted by night, the moon, dreams. Fleming is a voluptuous singer, who has been determined not to get by on vocal beauty alone. She doesn’t always succeed, but the effort, as it is revealed here, has its many rewards.

The songs she has chosen by Faure, Debussy, Joseph Marx, Richard Strauss and Rachmaninoff cover a range of styles and use a range of poetry. But night remained for composers and poets at the turn of the century, a time of heightened awareness, be it of clarity or ambiguity, peace or torment. Fleming sometimes paints these nightscapes with too broad a brush, as she does in her lush approach to Faure and in the generalized radiance of her Strauss (two composers for whom she is normally very well-suited). But she compensates by apllying a beguiling lushness to Debussy and stunning romantic expression to Rachmaninoff (her Americanized Russian notwithstanding).

As a concept, “Night Songs” pales somewhat next to Upshaw’s mysterious “White Moon: Songs to Morpheus,” an earlier Nonesuch CD. Still, Fleming remains a fount of radiance, and she has, in Thibaudet, an ideal partner, who illuminates her night with brilliant light.

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