I have not reviewed a concert in a long time. It always annoyed me to be a critic because you have to find some bad or the reviewer us considered incompetent. It’s also why I don’t particularly like critics, especially music critics. This time was different. I haven’t enjoyed or been affected by a performance like the one I saw this past Sunday in Newark in many years. It had a point. It was based on the Grammy awarded album “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,” a collaboration of Ms. Fleming and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Add to that the New Jersey Symphony conducted brilliantly by Xian Zhang, a peanut of a woman with the talent of a giant.
At one end, Ms. Fleming’s pop-voice performance of Kittel’s Pretty Bird was very bluesy to her brilliant performance of Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro.” Her soprano voice was the best I have ever heard performing it. Being an old babbo myself, it hit me particularly deeply.
Three numbers actually brought me to tears. The first was Curtis Green’s “Red Mountains Sometimes Cry” followed later by John Kander’s “A Letter from Sullivan Ballou” a love letter from a Union soldier to his wife written before he is killed in his first battle at Bull Run. But when the concert ended with Richard Rodgers “You’ll Never Walk Alone” I was almost bawling uncontrollably. The last time I was hit this hard was in 1969, a BSO performance at Tanglewood, of Bach’s St. John Passion conducted by Erich Leinsdorf.
I suggest you watch for future concerts of the NJ Symphony which will add Jersey City to its performance venues. It’s worth the watch and the attendance.
