“Milestones” is the unifying theme of this year’s La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest (July 25-Aug. 23). As the festival wound its way through its second week of four, the biggest milestone of all — death — got its own program on Aug. 5. The concert at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center featured soprano Renée Fleming singing Strauss’ valedictory Four Last Songs coupled, unusually, with Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time — two classics with very different takes on “endings.”
In her 2004 semi-autobiography The Inner Voice, Fleming speculated that “I might like to sing for another twenty years, or maybe longer.” More than two decades later, Fleming sings on with an active recital/concert schedule supporting projects like her “Voice of Nature: the Anthropocene Recital” tour and album and her 2024 book Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. At 66, Fleming’s so active that Strauss’ Four Last Songs feel anachronistic.
At 84, Richard Strauss sensed his days were numbered. When he first set the traditionally final song of Vier letzte Lieder, von Eichendorff’s “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset), to music, he was experiencing the heart issues that would indirectly kill him in 1949. With its allusions to his past works, images of weariness and dimming light, and not-so-ambiguous coda (“Could this perhaps be death?”), the Four Last Songs (so dubbed after Strauss died) sound very much like a requiem for himself.
It’s also been called Strauss’ “final hymn to his idealized soprano voice.” For Strauss, that voice belonged either to his wife, Pauline de Ahna, or Kirsten Flagstad, who premiered the work in May 1950 in London with the Philharmonia Orchestra led by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Fleming’s warm, luminous 1996 recording with Christoph Eschenbach placed her among the ideal sopranos (Flagstad, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Jessye Norman) who’ve taken on what Fleming calls “this cornerstone of the soprano concert repertoire.”
As the regally decked-out Fleming joined conductor Alan Gilbert’s 23-member ensemble in James Ledger‘s 2005 arrangement for chamber orchestra at The Conrad, the question was how much of her 1996 vocal opulence had survived the passage of time.
After 38 years and some 2,000 performances, Fleming’s middle voice lacks the heft of her still-robust upper register. Though the former was occasionally lost in the orchestral mix, Fleming’s performance was a triumph of artistry and taste. She navigated the rapid modulations of “Frühling” (Spring) with ease while projecting its high-tessitura passages (“Von deinem Duft und Vogelsang” and “Von Licht übergossen”) with power. Her tenderly floated “Müdgeword’nen Augen zu” at the close of “September” showed undiminished interpretive nuance.
“Beim Schlafengehen” (Upon Going to Sleep) became an art-song masterclass in finely gauged accents and text-and-score synergy. Fleming’s sustained B flat in “Tief und tausendfach zu leben” soared easily. She unfurled Strauss’ “Im Abendrot” magisterially, giving subtle buoyancy to “O weiter, stiller Friede” (O spacious, silent peace) and “etwa” in the final line, “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (Could this perhaps be death?).
SummerFest’s all-star orchestra gave Fleming lustrous support. The Pacific Symphony’s Kaylett Torrez lofted Strauss’ deft horn writing with grace and glow, and violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley gorgeously evoked the soul in free flight in “Beim Schlafengehen.” In “Im Abendrot,” flutist Rose Lombardo’s lovely delivery of the “dream-seeking” skylarks’ flight nicely offset the last line’s gentle descent into finality: “Tod” (death).
The skylarks’ song — and Strauss’ quote from his early tone poem Tod und Verklärung(Death and Transfiguration) — were as close to a transcendent message as the composer, a non-religious, baptized Catholic, was willing to go. For devoutly Catholic Messiaen (“Je suis né croyant”: I was born a believer), on the other hand, transcendence was so certain as to go without saying. His Quartet for the End of Time, written in a German POW stalag, proclaimed not the end of war, captivity, or death but literally of time itself (“with its sadnesses and tedium”) — the promised transformation of the world into God’s kingdom.
To capture or imagine this state, Messiaen innovated musically — rhythmically (palindromes, irregular added beats, compressed or stretched rhythms), harmonically (symbolic modes, progression-free harmonies), in tempo (markings/instructions such as “infinitely slow” and “sustain implacably extremely slow speeds”), in content (realistic bird-song transcriptions), and inspiration (the Book of Revelation of St. John; Northern Lights; again birdsong; synesthetic composition [“blue-orange chords”]).
It’s fortuitous that so ambitious and innovative a work was scored only for clarinet, violin, piano, and cello (the instruments available in Stalag VIII-A). Anything larger might have rendered Messiaen’s music unwieldy or indigestible. Indeed, only in the first, second, sixth, and seventh movements do all four instruments play. Though the eight-movement work is still notoriously difficult, pianist (and SummerFest music director) Inon Barnatan, violinist Gilbert, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, and clarinetist Ricardo Morales made it seem not effortless but all in a good day’s work.
Precise ensemble was essential. Across the 47-minute work, this quartet was locked in. Though Messiaen treats each instrument democratically, Morales and Barnatan made it all gel. In “Vocalise” (movement II) Barnatan’s percussive playing vividly evoked the “mighty angel’s” proclamation of time’s end (Gilbert’s harmonics nicely captured heaven’s eternal drone). In “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus” (Praise to Jesus’ Eternity) (V), Barnatan’s steady, bell-like tolling was the anchor under Altstaedt’s suddenly swelling, aching crescendo. And Barnatan’s sustained pedal and terraced dynamics underneath Gilbert’s high-pitched ascension created a magical, other-worldly echo in “Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus”(Praise to Jesus’ Immortality) (VIII).
For his part, Morales’ virtuosic display in the mournful opening to “Abime des oiseaux”(Abyss of the Birds) (III) made virtual why escaping meandering time might be wished for, and in the second section why bird song so entranced Messiaen — its joy and freedom seemed not of this world (“We walk, he flies. We make war, he sings”). The massive weight Morales and Barnatan brought to the tutti fortissimos of “Danse de la fureur” (Dance of Fury) (VI) was, as ordered, apocalyptic.
This was a creatively framed program with first-order playing, crowned by a tireless first-lady emerita of opera.
For information about remaining SummerFest concerts this season, go here.