GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – July 2019

A number of years ago, during the run of my erstwhile BBC Radio 3 show Stage and Screen, I took to the stage of the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre with the soprano Renée Fleming for an in-depth conversation about her ever broadening and ever more spectacular career (at that point there was no indication that an asteroid would one day bear her name as it does now). But before we arrived on stage I played her rather startling version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’. There must have been a few in the audience that night who will have wondered if they were at the right event on the right day, such was the vocal transformation – and indeed even the astute vocal coach Mary King was momentarily taken in and taken aback.

Since then, in tandem with her opera and concertising, Fleming has embraced a number of different vocal styles through her love for and fascination with Jazz, Inde Pop, and Broadway – and, as part of her consulting role with Chicago Lyric Opera, has launched Chicago Voices in celebration of that diversity. And that’s not all. Between a wide-ranging Broadway album and her current disc of Brahms, Schumann and Mahler song she’s actually trodden the boards of the Broadway stage as Nettie Fowler in a much-praised revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel delivering ‘the football song’ (Liverpool, that is) eight times a week. Last month she was back in London playing Margaret Johnson in Adam Guettel (Richard Rodgers’ grandson) and Craig Lucas’ extraordinary The Light in the Piazza and during a break in rehearsal for ‘official business’ we found some down time to talk further about voices and their relationship to the rich and varied complexions of music theatre. Guettel’s piece is the most sophisticated of hybrids requiring a whole raft of vocal colours. ‘Fable’, the eleven o’clock number that launched Fleming’s Broadway album, delivers a Niagara of emotion in soprano mode, though the role as a whole, says Fleming, sits a lot lower in the voice than that lofty place where she normally ‘lives’. The vocal adjustment required has more to do with extending the ‘conversational’ tone of the dialogue (and there’s a lot of it) into the sung delivery than any realignment of head and chest tones.

The radio microphones deployed in musicals help, of course, doing some of the heavy lifting and enabling the eight shows a week. But, as Fleming is quick to point out, there is another dimension – a ‘confidential’ tone, an intimacy that is only possible when the sound is scaled back and the delivery is to some extent ‘internalised’. Of course, you can only get out of a microphone what you put into it – but that scaling back of the vocal projection can open up extraordinary new colours. There’s a pivotal song on Piazza called ‘Dividing Day’ and the whole point of it is that it is quietly devastating.

I vividly remember hearing the early demo tapes for the show – the lushness and spun quality of the melodic lines (full of Italianate heat and romance) preferring by far to journey than to arrive. But more vivid still was Guettel himself rolling out the prelude to the piece as if its creation was simply a process of improvisation. Perhaps it was. The piano, he casually let slip, belonged to his grandfather, Richard Rodgers.