BWW Reviews: Soprano Nina Stemme Leaves Audience 'In the Dark' with Swedish Chamber Orchestra

Anyone expecting vocal fireworks from soprano Nina Stemme's appearance last night at Alice Tully Hall with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, under Thomas Dausgaard, was woefully disappointed. Count me as one of them.

Let me put it another way: Take one of today's leading interpreters of Wagner and Strauss--think Isolde, Brünnhilde, Ariadne and the Marshallin--and have her sing "The Saga of Jenny" from the Weill-Gershwin musical "Lady in the Dark" and you know what was wrong with this performance. New York audiences are hungry to hear Stemme sing full-throttle, judging by the reception she was given at last year's Carnegie Hall performance of Strauss's SALOME with the Cleveland Orchestra. (She won't be back at the Met for another three years, in Strauss's ELEKTRA.) This concert was hardly a consolation prize.

The Swedish Chamber Orchestra's chief conductor, Thomas Dausgaard, had an interesting idea for the program: a nonstop mix of orchestral pieces and songs that painted a somber--some might say stereotypically Swedish--mood. (How did "Jenny" fit into this? Not well.) Unfortunately, the concept didn't really pan out, as Stemme wandered around the stage, singing from various locations to no particular effect.

In the program notes, I read that she is "not one to be stereotyped." Well, I applaud any artist's right to express him- or herself as they see fit. Granted, I prefer the grand music and gestures of opera to the intimate world of lieder, or art songs. Yet I appreciate them both. But there was not much in this program that showed off her artistry or her insights into her music, which included a string of songs from various composers that mostly ran between two and four minutes in length. While she did some beautiful singing in these miniatures, she did not transport listeners to another sphere. Indeed, she frequently seemed ill at ease in the program.

She began with a lovely song by Grieg, "Jeg elsker dig! (I love you!)" (to a text by Hans Christian Anderson, no less), but was unable to lighten her big voice when the music demanded it of her. (She sounded better when she repeated the song as one of her encores.) Her rendition of Berlioz' "La spectre de la rose" showed little affinity for French and, musically, seemed to lie below her comfort range; her performance couldn't be totally attributed to her visible distress from a ringing cellphone. She showed greater connection to a pair of understated songs from Wagner's "Wesendonck-Lieder," Strauss's gorgeous "Morgen (Morning)" and the very brief but pointed "Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden)" by Schubert.

Dausgaard led nimble performances from the orchestra in the songs; in fact, the ensemble came off better in general than the soloist, with the chamber group filling the hall with beautiful sounds. The conductor drew a powerful performance of Beethoven's "Coriolan" Overture and, in the second half of the concert, a Brahms' First Symphony that clearly showed its debt to Beethoven. Too bad they didn't bring back Stemme for an aria from FIDELIO, Beethoven's only opera and another of the soprano's favored roles.

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