This release aims to be more than just another opera-stars-sing-Broadway album. Renée Fleming and Bryn Terfel both profess a lifelong love for musical theatre, something that comes across in their high-spirited performances. Also, the tunes they’ve chosen, many of which come from relatively recent musicals–including Passion, Mystery of Edwin Drood, Ragtime, Les Miserables, and Parade–are less overtly operatic in nature, and more pop-styled. That said, the album does open with a rather grandiose duo rendition of “Not while I’m around” from Sweeney Todd, but things get progressively lighter from there. Fleming, who sang quite a bit of jazz before she considered an opera career, has an easier time toning down the insistent vibrato cultivated by her operatic training, and she really loosens up for a couple of her solo turns, especially “All the Wasted Time” (from Parade), where she exquisitely communicates the character’s raw, desperate passion. Terfel’s stage experience in Sweeney Todd serves him well in “Pretty Women”, where he unerringly communicates Judge Turpin’s arrogant malevolence and barely concealed lust. He also displays considerable acting ability in his blustery, swaggering rendition of “Seventy Six Trombones”.
Still, for all their familiarity with the Broadway vernacular, there’s no forgetting Terfel and Fleming possess highly trained and remarkably accomplished operatic voices. Thus you hear buttery smooth legato and breathtaking purity of tone in Fleming’s “Hello Young Lovers”, while Terfel gives “I don’t remember you” (from The Happy Time) the unabashed “big voice” treatment. The singers receive support from the tastefully “modern” arrangements, performed with sensitivity and real flair by Paul Gemignani and the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera. So, while this collection probably won’t please either opera or Broadway purists, it nonetheless succeeds on its own terms and makes for some interesting listening.
