Opera star, jazz artist Barber mix it up at the Kennedy Center
Version 0 of 1. Renee Fleming, the star soprano, sang at the Kennedy Center, twice, on Wednesday night. Did you know that? A lot of people evidently didn’t. The program, performed at 7 and 9, focused on the music of the jazz artist Patricia Barber, so Barber’s fans came as well. But there weren’t all that many of either. The Terrace Theater, one of the Kennedy Center’s smaller spaces, had rows of empty seats. Fleming is famously a jazz lover and has invoked the disdain of opera fans, not by performing jazz so much as by how she performs it. Her delivery on Wednesday, much to her credit, avoided a lot of the treacly swooping and breathiness she used to use in jazz literature. She tried to play it very straight. Playing it straight, unfortunately, meant losing a lot of the lustrous classical sound of her voice, and some of the five songs in the first set, all written by Barber and arranged as art songs for voice and piano accompaniment (Craig Terry), sounded a little thin and acidic. [Renee Fleming’s “American Voices” festival transcends disappointing concert.] Barber did a set with her band, and when she began to sing, the music and the evening snapped into focus, and it became clear that this was someone you wanted to celebrate. She sings with a lyrical artlessness, melding a talky, conversational delivery with a sweet voice and sophisticated lyrics — all supported by a really good instrumental trio (Patrick Mulcahy on bass, Neal Alger on guitar and Jon Deitemyer on drums). [From February: Mastering the art of entertainment: Fleming in recital. ] But once you’d had that, everything else seemed all the more watered down. In the concluding songs, offered as duets (including “Let it Snow”), Fleming took a secondary, descant role to Barber’s firmer, lower voice. There were a couple of nods to the classical repertoire, and arguably a highlight of the evening was “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” sung by Fleming with Terry as straight man-accompanist, then embellished the second time around with a piano improvisation by Barber. It showed everyone at their best. For the rest, I was really glad for the introduction to a wonderful artist whose work I hadn’t known before, and I give Fleming full credit for doing her part to draw attention to her, but the evening itself wasn’t entirely satisfying. |