Classic CD: Berg & Wellesz, Emerson String Quartet with Renee Fleming (Decca)

Berg & Wellesz, Emerson String Quartet with Renee Fleming (Decca)

Renee Fleming recently made her first visit to our country, for one Wellington concert with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, working her way from sensuous Ravel to sing-along My Fair Lady.

The American soprano's latest CD gives a much better indication of her stature, paired with Emerson String Quartet in two uncompromising 20th century classics. The six movements of Berg's Lyric Suite outline the tortures and ecstasies of extra-marital passion with an almost Freudian rigour.

The great philosopher Theodor Adorno found a latent opera here and perhaps the Emersons heed his words in this intense performance.

Berg may be writing in the feared 12-tone style, but this music has a harmonic accessibility that shouldn't worry those at ease in Wagner's richer patches.

Fleming appears in an alternative version of Berg's Finale, singing Baudelaire's De Profundis.

Her lustrous voice, often doubled with string lines, evokes dark and thrilling mysteries, especially when a signature phrase from Tristan and Isolde floats by.

Other groups usually pair the Lyric Suite with the music of Berg's 12-tone colleagues Schoenberg and Webern; the Emersons have chosen Teutonic rarities.

You won't be hearing Egon Wellesz (1885-1974) in concert halls any time soon but the Austrian's highly saturated harmonic palette is the perfect complement to that of Berg.

Wellesz's 1934 Sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning takes six of the poet's Sonnets from the Portuguese, translated by Rainer Maria Rilke, and invests them with a middle-European gravitas.

You'll be swept away in the first, when the dense atonal textures miraculously lighten for Fleming to praise the power of love over death. The capricious third setting, with musical images of crickets singing to mandolins, inspires a dazzling piece of writing in the style of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

Eric Zeisl's Come sweet death is a short and moving coda, written by a Jewish composer who exchanged Nazi Germany for the Hollywood studio system. Ironically, this short, sweet chorale setting, lusciously delivered, is curiously close to the Negro spiritual encores popular with other divas. A nice touch.

Verdict: After distributing lollipops in Wellington, an American soprano reveals her serious side on disc.