Here Renée Fleming joins a long line of star recitalists falling victim to later-career stage affectation. Though Maria Callas can’t be fully understood without the videos that show how her voice and physicality were all of a piece, Lotte Lehmann is probably better remembered by those not familiar with her oft-documented Kabuki-like repertoire of melodramatic physical gestures. In Fleming’s Vienna recital, voice and face sometimes tell different stories, the dissonance between the two creating a fatal distraction from her artistry and fairly healthy vocal state at the expense of the poetic authenticity.

Fleming’s programme aims high, themed around the great period of Viennese culture in the decades before the rise of Nazism in 1933. Her chronological arrangement begins with Hugo Wolf looking back to Goethe, continues with Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder and then goes on to little-known groups of Zemlinsky and Korngold songs that can be heard as ongoing dialogues with the possibilities of atonality. But, from the first moments, the pastoral Wolf songs seem like a series of photo opportunities. Though her Mahler performances would have benefited from pianist Maciej Pikulski taking a stronger stance, Fleming is more integrated musically and dramatically though her visual presentation is so overwrought that she’s ripe for intervention from Overactresses Anonymous.

More interestingly, the Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Korngold sets sink into the cool, cruel world of pre-war Viennese sexuality, the Zemlinsky songs being particularly full of lurid, self-debasing ruminations, while Korngold’s complex harmonies are a good match for poems about what makes one’s blood ‘sparkle’. During the Korngold, Fleming is especially prone to flash a reassuring smile that seems to tell listeners that it’s only a song. The lighter encores, mostly Viennese in character, show Fleming courting the audience’s allegiances, shamelessly growing ever more free with her vocalism and becoming particularly tasteless during her own improvisation in Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. Would it be better to just listen to the DVD? Much. But that’s not what this medium is.