Renée Fleming’s artistic stature hasn’t kept pace with her superstardom – isn’t that so often the case? – and this new compilation of her best live Metropolitan Opera moments will bolster the opinions of both admirers and detractors.

The vocal quality isn’t in question. At one point, around 20 years ago, she fell into some bad habits (scooping) but addressed them. When she stepped away from the Met in 2017 she was singing well but seemed less engaged by her longtime roles (Rusalka, for one). She was presenting opera characters (with all the detachment that implies) rather than inhabiting them. From there, she restlessly explored non-musical theatre, Broadway and other venues before returning to the Met this season in the premiere production of The Hours.

Certainly, the sumptuous sound heard in this two-disc set overtook her diction to varying degrees. By the time she got to The Merry Widow in 2015, her English was often unintelligible. Even worse, in the Song to the Moon from Rusalka, Fleming’s emotionally inauthentic vocal swells seem to exist for projecting the music to a 4000-seat opera house.

The compensation is when – words aside – her theatrical savvy allowed her dramatic intention to come through, writ large and sounding gorgeous. Optimum Fleming moments are when voice, intelligence, fashion-model poise and relatively good diction are fused by her passion for the material. Interpretative techniques that can seem mannered in some performances become relevant and vibrant.

The set’s high point is ‘Das war sehr gut, Mandryka’ from Arabella, in which the gradual expansion of her tone quality becomes a visceral dramatisation of how her character fearlessly opens her heart to the man she will marry – conducted by Christoph Eschenbach, who inspired her most emotionally authentic performances, whether in Der Rosenkavalier (Decca, 3/00) or Strauss’s Four Last Songs (RCA, 3/97).

Other such moments are in roles that you couldn’t predict. The Il pirata excerpt promises a hint of what Fleming’s Norma might have been like (she announced the role at one point but later cancelled). After a strangely heavy-handed, charmless ‘Obéissons quand leur voix appelle’ from Massenet’s Manon, Fleming’s ‘N’est-ce plus ma main?’ is a lightning-in-the-bottle moment that captures a peak thrill of the operatic medium. Whether or not Fleming is convincing as a backwood girl in Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, the emotional core is there, such as the longing and rapture of ‘Ain’t it a pretty night?’. ‘Depuis le jour’ from Louise has Fleming using every trick in her book – the soft attacks, sliding around on the phrase – but the fact that she can’t quite nail some of the high notes turns into a thrill unto itself: the great Fleming is working hard for her art, her aria and her audience.

The Willow Song and Ave Maria from Otello deserve special mention partly because Desdemona was one of her best roles: this isn’t her best outing with this great Verdi scene (she was better in the Met’s virtual 2020 gala) but it’s still a considerable musico-dramatic achievement, though one showing her tendency to over-egg the music with contemplative tempos. James Levine particularly indulged her in that direction, most noticeably in ‘Dove sono’ from The Marriage of Figaro. On stage, such tempos perhaps made sense because of the shared moments between singer and audience. But in a sound-only medium, it sounds like Mozart from a previous age. Which it is.

As recent as these selections seem, they have historic elements. Any number of the conductors here are deceased, disgraced or both, and their work is memorably captured here. The uniquely combustible presence that the late baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky brought to the stage in excerpts from Traviata and Onegin all but guaranteed that Fleming would be deep in the moment and at her best. Her longtime partnership with mezzo-soprano Susan Graham is richly documented in an ecstatic Act 3 Trio from Der Rosenkavalier. Now-retired Alan Opie is her forceful counterpart in a Peter Grimes excerpt.

Less happily, her later, questionable repertoire choices reflect an era where generalists got away with singing operas that are now increasingly cast with specialists. Though Fleming sang Handel early in her career, the 2006 Rodelinda has her navigating the coloratura well enough but not meaningfully. In 2010 she returned to the scene of even greater early-career glory with Rossini’s Armida. But even in excerpts that skirt the opera’s most virtuoso moments, Fleming is nowhere close to her 1994 knockout recording (Sony, 3/95). Luckily, this troubled second disc ends with Mariettas Lied from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, an end-of-an-era opera in which her rounded phrases embody the ache of existence. But beware of closing the book on the Fleming era. We can all but count on postscripts.