A pretty night for Renee Fleming

Renee Fleming aims to please. But the reigning American diva has arrived at the point where she doesn’t have to work very hard to please a packed house of devotees primed to applaud even if she sings the proverbial phone book.

Yet while Fleming’s Los Angeles Opera-sponsored recital at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night was obviously a love-in, she didn’t take the easy route -- say, the usual soprano’s “greatest hits” -- to bring it on.

Fleming astutely plugged her latest recording, a collection of Handel arias, by offering five Handel oratorio excerpts at the start, her voice not yet in full evening bloom. From there, though, she plunged deeply into German lieder country -- the overripe post-Romantic thicket of Alban Berg’s “Seven Early Songs,” a carefully sequenced clutch of sentimental Schumann lieder -- turning on the power at will in her polished timbre with the bare hint of an edge.

More illuminating for an American audience, though, was Fleming’s identification with a series of Southern-fried roles. She originated the part of Blanche in Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1998 -- and in returning to “I Can Smell the Sea Air” from near the close of that opera, her interpretation has grown more passionate, less self-conscious.

Fleming leaned glamorously against the piano during “Ain’t It a Pretty Night?” from Carlyle Floyd’s “Susannah,” conveying a sweetly naive Southern languor, later finding the folk-song-like flavor in another excerpt, “The Trees on the Mountain.”

Most affecting was a song from Broadway’s John Kander, an attractive, emotionally riveting setting of a letter from Maj. Sullivan Ballou written just before the Battle of Bull Run during the Civil War.

With pianist Hartmut Holl offering delicate, totally self-effacing accompaniment (as he did all night), Fleming was most generous with encores -- five of them. She dedicated Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” to the memory of one of her early role models, Victoria de los Angeles (who died Saturday), stretching it out beyond the breaking point. Yet she made more effectively elastic work out of Gershwin’s “Summertime” -- pronouncing “good-look-ing” in a Billie Holiday manner. And there was room for her “favorite” composer, Richard Strauss, with “Cacilie” and “Morgen.”