Sic Semper Tyrannis

Renee Fleming and My Evening Amongst the Singers

Saturday night I attended a fantastic OKC Philharmonic concert. The soloist was Renee Fleming, a soprano who apparently is a big deal. Now, I had never heard of her before. I’m not in the vocalist/ opera world. I’m an instrumentalist and barely even in the classical world, so singers tend to sound the same to me. But Ms. Fleming’s performance was unlike anything I’ve ever heard. “Voice of an angel” is cliché and inappropriate. Hers was more like the voice of an angel’s loving mother. The idea of a single voice filling up that huge hall (over a full orchestra no less), is amazing and I think I heard the two things about her technique, (apart from her “musicality”), that make her so revered. One, she had a lot of lower overtones in her timbre-which gave her a pleasant sound, even though she sings in high registers. And the other thing I had elucidated for me by a soprano friend was her equal tone in all the registers, which is apparently very difficult. (Everything vocal is difficult for old “two-step-range” me.)

There was a lot of variety on the program, as she sang some Mozart, faux-Handel, Puccini, Smetana, the famous aria “O mio babbino caro,” from the opera Gianni Schicchi, (the only one I had heard before), and some contemporary, jazz/pop-leaning stuff, among other things. Ms. Fleming also came across as very charming in her on-stage banter. A sense of humor and humility is always nice to see in supremely talented people. Also interesting was her comment about how English-speaking opera singers basically strive to deny their heritage to become European-- having to learn Italian, French, German, Polish, Russian, all with perfect diction.

Another notable phenomenon I observed from the outset was that the sold-out audience sang the national anthem really well. I heard lots of confident, obviously trained voices around me as I croaked out my own feeble attempt. And I connected the dots. That’s the kind of crowd you get when you feature a star soprano from the Met: divas in training, voice teachers and students, opera lovers…What a receptive, energetic crowd! They gave her a standing ovation going into intermission, and quite rightly so, I might add. And one fun moment was when she invited the audience to sing along to the second verse of “I Could Have Danced All Night” at the end of the programmed songs, before her encores. And again, as they sang, I heard that this was a very discerning group of folks.

All of this is not to mention the overtures that the orchestra played during the diva’s breaks—my favorite being Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Liebestod, a maddeningly beautiful exercise in the delay of resolution, apparently a blueprint for the “evils” of atonalism that would follow in later decades, which got me to thinking about how I often hear a certain animosity of those in the traditional classical world toward the music of the twentieth century and how that makes me feel a little bit hurt. The music of the serialists and all manner of other academics that I’ve never even heard of tend to get trashed frequently by people like conductors and musicians in this particular classical music world. I happen to like a little bit of experimentalism and music meant to be “interesting” or “provocative” mixed in with music meant to be “beautiful.” (However, my paycheck doesn’t come from appealing to the tastes of grey-haired folks with money to burn.) I also liked Massenet’s “Thais Meditation,” a lyrical violin showpiece for the new concertmaster.

And you can pretty much count on good old Eldon Matlick, the principal hornist, to botch an exposed passage on every concert and he didn’t let me down this time- flubbing one of the main themes of the Rossini overture to The Barber of Seville, which contains one of the most famous musical gestures ever committed to staff paper.

Anyway, all of this is to say that it was a wonderfully diverse concert of affective music-making and made me proud to be a human being.

posted by Mike @ 6:33 PM