'Full emotional conviction': Renée Fleming & Evgeny Kissin | Photo: Chris Lee

*****

The Renée Fleming/Evgeny Kissin joint recital at May 31 at Carnegie initially looked like an answer to a question nobody thought to ask. The two musicians inhabit such separate spheres that their only points in common would seem to be their ability to sell out Carnegie Hall. A legendary concert in the making? Consider the distinctively competitive 1976 collaboration between Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Vladimir Horowitz in Schumann's Dichterliebe at Carnegie Hall - unlike any performance, then and now. 

Best to calm down those memories, and enjoy the rather different experience that unfolded with Fleming and Kissin. At the beginning of lockdown, they recorded the Schubert Ave Maria on their respective phones - he in Prague, she in Virginia - in a YouTube video that quietly tallied 120,000-plus views as a consolation for the joint tour they were forced to cancel, specifically an April 2020 date at Carnegie Hall. Their association had come about at Kissin’s request - they met at various awards events - but has since resumed, with nothing but their respective schedules standing in the way of their continuing into the future. As well it should. 

In short, Fleming and Kissin brought out the best in each other with a spirit of generosity that also curbed each other’s excesses, such as his quiet ruminative tempos and her deploying vocal colors without full emotional conviction. In a recital with no particular concept, there were traditional groupings of songs by Schubert, Liszt, Duparc and Rachmaninoff, all of whom wrote beautifully for the voice but also gave the pianist much to do with solo postscripts summing up what came before. Kissin also had solo moments that were listed somewhat vaguely in the program and, at one point, had Fleming making a stage entrance at the wrong time (which she handled with poise and humor). 

Though an operatic superstar, Fleming's most satisfying moments have been in recital, and never more than in this one. She seems more sincere, more in the moment, when not having to project her voice and her character over a full orchestra - and perhaps benefitted even more from knowing she didn’t have to carry the recital on her own. The calculated visual presentation on her 2014 DVD A Recital With Renée Fleming: Vienna at the turn of the 20th Century wasn’t at all apparent at Carnegie Hall. The voice was in fine shape - with that whipped-cream-on-glass tone quality being undisturbed by excessive vibrato. In the first half, her read is of Liszt’s Im Rhein, Schonen Strome prompted a full spectrum of vocal colors in Heine’s description of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Kissin seemed to be going down his super-slow-tempo rabbit hole in Liszt’s slow-building solo-piano Sposalizio but soon showed how much he’s the master of the long musical line that accounted for the piece’s extraordinary overall impact. What makes him a distinctively great accompanist - in part - is his clean sonority that never competes with the voice. There’s simply no extraneous sound. Even his lowest-range bass notes don’t spread in ways that obscure the specific notes being played. Interesting, too, was the way they occasionally went a nano-second out of synch: It’s a tension-creating device I’ve heard him use in concertos. Together, they were in their respective elements in the concluding Duparc song: Le manoir de Rosemonde that describes the onset of love with battle imagery, giving Kissin opportunities to unfurl his technique and for Fleming to employ her operatic big guns. The encore? Ave Maria with an even more articulate treatment of the words and accompanying phrases than in the 2020 video.