Recitals with a Difference

Renée Fleming, the starry soprano, and Miranda Cuckson, a violinist who should be more starry

By Jay Nordlinger

Renée Fleming gave a recital in Carnegie Hall, as a great singer should. Is it your impression that we have fewer recitals today than we used to? It’s mine too. And there are statistics to back this. Orchestras, opera companies and chamber music are doing just fine (much as we like to wail that the sky is falling). Recitals, however, are becoming unfortunately rarer.

Fleming sang an unusual program, whose first half consisted of Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Korngold. These were composers considered by the Nazis “degenerate.” In the Nazi period, their music was banned, where Nazis ruled. And afterward? Schoenberg was performed and esteemed, all over the world. The others, not so much.

Renée Fleming performing with Hartmut Höll at Carnegie Hall. Photo by Chris Lee.

As the music scholar and recording executive Michael Haas once put it, composers such as Zemlinsky and Korngold faced a “second dictatorship”: modernists, who were determined to keep anything that smacked of the Romantic out. Often, these modernists denounced Zemlinsky et al. in the very same terms the Nazis had used.

On the second half of her program, Fleming sang songs by Brad Mehldau—an American born in 1970—and Richard Strauss. She is of course one of the great Straussians of our time. And Mehldau is lucky to have her as a champion. He has a champion in the Swedish mezzo Anne Sofie von Otter, too. Some of us don’t see what these women see in his songs. But their judgment is to be respected.

Fleming sang with her usual beauty of sound and musical intelligence. You could have quibbled with interpretation here and there, of course. You normally can. Fleming has the ability to make her sound “wide” or “thin”—to vary the ribbon of that sound, the stream of it. And she likes to “dig” into her lower notes, the way string players “dig” into their strings.

The best-known of the Strauss songs was “Traum durch die Dämmerung”—one of nature’s perfect songs, a piece of F-sharp-major perfection. Fleming was virtually made for the long, long lines at the end.

She sang four encores, beginning with another Strauss song, “Zueignung.” Of all the world’s songs, this is the one most frequently used as an encore. I base this rather bald observation on many years of attendance at voice recitals. Fleming’s (commendable) pianist, Hartmut Höll, began the song with one tempo; Fleming, when she entered, established a faster one, which is her right. In the final bars, she did something surprising: some sort of interpolation or improvisation. It was almost jazz-style.

She then sang the beloved aria from Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt, known as “Marietta’s Lied.” Following that was “I Feel Pretty,” from you-know-what, by you-know-whom. In this, Fleming was fast-fast. The song is a waltz, and she really kept your feet moving.

The soprano closed the evening with Strauss’s “Morgen,” another favorite encore, particularly of sopranos. Fleming did her best singing of the night in it. A colleague of mine wrote to me, “The ‘Morgen’ was sublime, with all the control, nuance, simplicity and beauty of sound that one could want.” I hate to farm out my music criticism, but I cannot improve on that.

A Pianist Not Needed

Miranda Cuckson is an American violinist with a busy career in both solo playing and chamber music. She is a notable friend to contemporary composers. And she teaches at Mannes College The New School for Music—which must be the most awkwardly named institution in America.

She played something unusual: an all-unaccompanied violin recital. In other words, she offered a program consisting entirely of music for unaccompanied violin. The great Russian Maxim Vengerov did this in Carnegie Hall about 10 years ago. Cuckson had a more exotic venue: the James Memorial Chapel in the Union Theological Seminary. The chapel was a little echo-y but interesting.

Naturally, she played Bach, the king of unaccompanied violin music (and much else). She also played music by two recent composers: Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) and Ralph Shapey (1921-2002). Mainly, she played music by Michael Hersch, the American composer born in 1971.

In everything, she showed complete and uncanny assurance. Seldom do you hear a player so confident—and with so much to be confident about. She has plenty of technique, but wears it lightly: The technique is strictly at the service of musical communication. She was bold and refined, straightforward and sensitive, proving that these are not contradictory qualities. And she played with exceptional concentration—as though she could not be budged from her task or purpose, no matter what.

There were two Hersch works on the program: in the snowy margins and Fourteen Pieces. The first is based on, or inspired by, or associated with, words of Bruno Schulz, a Polish-Jewish writer who was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer in 1942. The second is based on poetry by Primo Levi, the Italian-Jewish writer who survived Auschwitz and may or may not have committed suicide in 1987.

These two compositions are typically Herschian. They are different from each other, but we can still make some general points about the two of them, together. Their movements are short, sometimes in the nature of fragments. (I should mention that in the snowy margins has seven movements. The second work, as the title tells you, is divided into 14.) The movements are like distilled emotions, or thoughts. Hersch is very economical in his expression—economical without being parsimonious. And, like his performer on this evening, he has intense concentration.

The works have variety, for Hersch knows enough to sustain interest. He has a sense of balance, of how a work is coming off as a whole. For instance, just when things are getting heavy and taxing, he gives you a little relief—maybe something scherzo-like.

Fourteen Pieces and in the snowy margins, to give the order of their composition—the first was written in 2007, the second in 2010—are intellectual, emotional and virtuosic, all three. They take a serious violinist who is also a serious musician. Cuckson met all the requirements (though perhaps only the composer can know for sure). As I said, Cuckson has a busy career, but I believe she should have a bigger reputation than she does. I definitely know more ballyhooed violinists who play less well.

Departing from recently established practice, she did no talking from the stage. She had written extensive program notes, available for anyone to read. Otherwise, she was content to be a violinist, letting the music speak for itself. Is that still legal?