Friday night at SPAC was almost, almost too much: Wide-screen nature-zen National Geographic visuals over the Philadelphia Orchestra and lyric soprano Renee Fleming. Star of opera, Broadway and everything else she’s tried, she sang songwriters’ lyrics or poets’ words. Her voice and elegant presence plus glorious images overhead all but eclipsed the Philadelphians in the touring version of “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene” that won a Grammy.
She explained that in this Covid project, she and Philadelphia Orchestra Musical Director Yannick Nezet-Seguin reached from quarantine to embrace a world then out of reach. Friday, images re-opened that once-closed earth. This beautiful blend of sights and sounds that comprised the concert’s first half also had a point; as did the initially disjunct but increasingly cohesive second half whose visuals were of the performers.
At first “Voice of Nature” overwhelmed, from aerial splendor far aloft in auroras, clouds and stars to tiny plant and animal organisms. The flow of visual images was seamless, mostly, with more lap-dissolves than hard cuts in the editing. The sounds were segmented; 10 sung and spoken pieces with orchestral accompaniment. Soaring sequoias, sparse desert scapes, waters serene or stormy, creatures tiny or titanic, spread their wings, played in the waves. Sometimes images and lyrics matched; words we heard described scenes we saw. But they didn’t have to; meanings more often fit metaphorically than literally.
The music ranged from Handel to Bjork; the first words expressed awe at towering forests, its last words mourned “Red Mountains Sometimes Cry.” Conductor Robert Moody elicited the distinctive character of each accompanying orchestral episode while also preserving a unity that never felt forced.
If the images were romantic, the orchestral sounds were maybe more so, in the impressionist style of Debussy, Ravel or Vaughn Williams. Fleming’s voice – she may be our most modestly self-effacing and unarguably great vocal artist in range, sheer sound and affect – bridged the visual and the verbal.
Gradually, both began to express alarm at environmental damage and the distress of natural systems beset by fire and flood, glaciers calving icebergs – all linked implicitly to industrial pollution.
Even before this beauty-under-threat oratorio began, Fleming had directed the audience to kiosks uphill from the amphitheater, promoting programs and organizations mobilized to protect the environment.
It was all too gorgeous to feel didactic; it implied rather than insisted, and the closing credits onscreen highlighted the work of close allies to Fleming and Nezet-Seguin in creating the piece and promoting its cause.
After those credits, as a first-half encore, Burt Bacharach’s romantic pop classic “What the World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love,” urged love as antidote to disaster.
The second half began in a slightly jarring generic feel; Wagner’s “Prelude to Die Meistersinger” that might have introduced a “greatest hits” run of familiar classical war-horses. Visuals over this opener and throughout the second half showed orchestra players onscreen.
Fleming’s return gave shape and intent as a unified statement unfolded, song by song.
Arias of Leoncavallo and Puccini followed before Gould’s “An American Salute,” variations on “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” that spanned simple jingoism into parody and back again.
Then the music Broadway composer John Kander wrote for Fleming to sing “A Letter from Sullivan Ballou,” a compelling piece Ken Burns used in “The Civil War,” told the heartbreaking story of a soldier going into battle. Conveying to his wife his feelings focused by the risk of death, he proclaimed his deep, devoted and hopeful love for her. In plainspoken candor, his words conveyed the sentiments of a tender heart. And he expressed his willingness to forfeit his future with her and their sons to defend his country. Within a week, the letter writer was killed in the Civil War’s first major battle.
Now, sadly as true patriotism, devotion to truth and principle and self-sacrifice in defending them are derided as woke by amoral leaders who value nothing beyond power-mad ego and greed, the simple nobility of these sentiments shone like the sun in the National Geographic videos. Ballou’s words spoke for themselves; Fleming sang them to breathtakingly poignant effect.
She then lightened the mood in a show-tunes run, two John Kander Broadway-ish numbers culminating in the comforting word “Always;” the stirring “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” then the hilariously self-deprecating “Diva,” a delicious bit of show-biz brassy flash turned inside out with humor.
Here, Fleming proved she could sing the phone book to powerful and entertaining effect, and bring the laughs at the same time.
A generous encore began with the breezy romance of “I Could Have Danced All Night” before Leonard Cohen’s dependably exalting “Hallelujah.” Arguably no one has sung it better than Fleming on Friday, melody and words wrapping the evening in a velvety elegance as audience voices rose around Fleming’s in a chorus of everybody.
Hoke's Jukebox 