United Kingdom Wagner, R. Strauss – Renée Fleming sings Strauss: Renée Fleming (soprano), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Thomas Guggeis (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London, 5.3.2025. (JPr)
Wagner – Prelude and Liebestod (Tristan und Isolde); Overture and Venusberg Music (Tannhäuser); Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin); Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg)
R. Strauss – Four Last Songs
How to attract a sell-out audience for a concert of familiar Wagner opera orchestral excerpts which would not usually attract a full house; not even if conducted, as here, by a wunderkind? Include half-an-hour of another composer, Richard Strauss, from a much-feted and much-loved soprano, Renée Fleming, whose career is slowly winding down after a stellar career on concert platforms or in opera houses.
Richard Strauss had Kirsten Flagstad in mind when he wrote the Vier letzte Lieder or as translated, Four Last Songs, and she gave the first performance of them in May 1950 at the composer’s request. Although famed for her Strauss, Flagstad was the leading Wagnerian soprano of the mid-twentieth century. They are more often sung by a lyric- rather than a dramatic – soprano, someone who is an Elsa (Lohengrin) rather than an Isolde (Tristan und Isolde). Indeed though Fleming once sang Eva (in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger) at Bayreuth in 1996 there was little Wagner before or after that. At the Royal Festival Hall I would have preferred an Isolde rather than an Elsa … or Eva. For me, Fleming’s voice now doesn’t have the amplitude to envelope me at the rear of the front stalls, I would be interested to know what those at the back or top of the Royal Festival Hall experienced.
Fleming’s approach to the Four Last Songs was restrained and dignified – would you expect anything less? – her face remained fairly beatific throughout and she allowed the emotion of the songs to arise intrinsically from the composer’s ever-changing orchestral colours. I heard comments around me concerning Fleming’s age, but age must not be an ’excuse’ for whatever singer is on the concert platform or in the theatre and putting themselves in front of the public. Artistry is the last thing that fails a singer, as well as is the ability to spin out a long melodic line, breath control notwithstanding, and Fleming’s singing retains much we remember from years gone by. A straightforward approach allows for some beautiful nuances and these were plentiful here. Fleming’s voice was slow to warm up and there was a suggestion of choppy phrasing in the opening Frϋhling (Spring), and throughout diction appeared sacrificed for sheer beauty of sound.
I wonder how many times Fleming has sung these songs recently? In the last song, ‘Im Abendrot’ (At Sunset) Fleming did not overly convey despair but gave it a very apt feeling of serenity which matched the world-weary resignation to approaching death described by von Eichendorff‘s text and as experienced by Strauss at the end of his long life. Fleming only found her true voice with the encore Morgen! (Tomorow!) when her beguiling singing – of perhaps Strauss’s simplest and most sublime song – made time standstill.
Thomas Guggeis, the general music director of Frankfurt Opera who was making his debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, was the most accommodating of collaborators. He ensured the resources Fleming was harnessing allowed her voice to float above the reduced forces of the LPO; with the solos of Leader Peter Schoeman particularly memorable in Beim Schlafengehen (Going to Sleep).
Despite only in his early thirties Wagner has been very prominent already in Guggeis’s career especially since – as former assistant to Daniel Barenboim – he replaced him and conducted the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Ring cycle in 2022. What he brought to his Wagner at the Royal Festival Hall was a young conductor’s guide to the composer. There was no undue pomposity or pretentiousness – which is possibly a good thing – however it all lacked the mystery or transcendence that was a feature of much of the Wagner the orchestra played. A huge body of strings didn’t always have the luscious tone required and the brass was sometimes more astringent than warm; nevertheless there was no denying the sheer visceral power of the full orchestral tutti moments.
Guggeis and his musicians brought suitable yearning to the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde after a stuttering start and this was before Fleming’s Strauss. Unexpectedly after the interval the LPO played everything else as one extended symphonic piece with the Lohengrin Prelude as the scherzo. This had those unfamiliar with the music rifling through their programmes and wondering what they were now hearing. The Tannhäuser bacchanale is literally a musical orgy and that is how it sounded and everything ended with a rumbustious – can it ever be anything else – Die Meistersinger Overture. However Guggeis had the apprentices, less cavorting and more body-popping, and that highlighted his propulsive conducting of all the Wagner.
Jim Pritchard