Great personalities inspire extreme reactions. At the end of Jessye Norman's two recent Wigmore Hall recitals, there was an atmosphere bordering on religiosity on both evenings, as devoted admirers brought flowers to hand up to the stage. With regal grace, Norman accepted each tribute, bending forward to grasp the hand of the idolater and exchange a few words. She held on to the bunches of flowers to sing her sequence of encores, encouraging a gradual rise of fervour, ending in standing ovations.
When the two evenings were first announced, as part of the Wigmore Centenary Festival, the expected repertory was Schubert's Winterreise. This seemed like a daring move. Few sopranos have ever attempted this cycle, so evidently caution got the better of her in the end, and the evenings were mixed programmes of Lieder and melodie. (Norman will perform Winterreise, in a staging by Robert Wilson at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, this October.)
It is just 30 years since Jessye Norman first sang in London - Berlioz at the Proms in 1971. Her Covent Garden debut was the following year, and her first solo recital was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1973, a few weeks before Callas's farewell concerts next door at the Royal Festival Hall. At the time, it seemed unlikely that the mantle of prima donna assoluta would pass from Callas to Norman, but that is what eventually happened.
Callas, who needed to take more care of her voice, could never reconcile herself to taking on a different repertory, Norman has constantly changed direction, embracing microphone technique for Duke Ellington and Michel Legrand, and last year giving the world premiere of Judith Weir's woman.life.song. Weir's cycle, commissioned by Norman, exploited the singer's voice at its best, concentrating on the middle range, with just a couple of excursions high and low, as if to prove that she still has the power.
The first of the Wigmore evenings seemed designed to do the same and, with hair flowing to her shoulders, in a flowery coat of many colours, she gave one of the best recitals I have ever heard from her. The programme was austere - Schubert, Berg and Poulenc - but it enabled her to pass from the lyrical outpouring of Berg's Seven Early Songs through Poulenc's La fraIcheur et le feu to a final group of Apollinaire settings by Poulenc, acted and sung with a fusion of word and music that was entrancing.
The second concert, although offering a similar mixture of Lieder and melodie by Ravel, Satie, Brahms and Wolf, was more problematic. There were lovely things in Ravel's Sheherazade, heard for once in its original version for voice and piano, rather than the better-known orchestral form. Only in Satie's Trois melodies did she seem entirely confident - this featured all those years ago in her concert at QEH. In the complicated wordplay about "oisetier" and "noisetiers" she seemed just like the young singer of all those years ago, who then dared to sing as an encore the Urlicht from Mahler's Second Symphony. Nowadays, the encores are calculated to frame just one song in English. On the first evening, it was a spiritual, "On my journey", sung with a jazzy humour, and at the second recital, Copland's setting of Emily Dickinson's "Why do they shut me out of heaven?". This ends with the words "Did I sing too loud?" and Norman delivered the phrase with a joyous toss of the head. There was something special and rather moving about these recitals. Singers late in their careers can sometimes find, as their stamina and power diminishes, a new sensitivity and fragility.
