Renée Fleming has put out a crossover album. Why be coy?


The acclaimed soprano Renee Fleming, her recording company and her public relations agency have been working hard to make one thing abundantly clear: “Dark Hope,” her new recording of indie rock songs, is not a crossover project.

To many classical music critics and tradition-minded artists, the commercial crossover projects in the last two decades are sure signs, in the words of the esteemed British baritone Thomas Allen, that “well-organized hijackers” and “money-grabbing, P.R.-led” marketers are using “wet T-shirted” violinists to sell classical records.

No wonder Ms. Fleming is at pains to distinguish “Dark Hope” from crossover.

In her liner notes for the album, just released in Europe and the United States, she writes that the “genre referred to as ‘crossover’ usually has performers singing popular music in a classically trained style with amplification and traditional instrumentation.” Her goal, she explains, is “to bypass the middle ground and get to the other side of the divide entirely.” Ms. Fleming and her handlers are being curiously sheepish about her accomplishments on this album. Vocally she has turned herself into an indie rock singer: from the opening track, the Muse song “Endlessly,” she sounds more like Annie Lennox than “America’s favorite soprano,” as she has long been billed.

So why does she sound so defensive? In concept there is nothing wrong with artists from one genre performing music from another. And classical crossover has an honorable history, dating from the early decades of recording, when Caruso made as much money from his hit recordings of popular songs like “For You Alone” and “Over There” (George M. Cohan’s rally-thehome- front song during World War I) as from arias like “La donna e mobile” and “Vesti la giubba.”

Ms. Fleming is correct when she says that for the most part crossover refers to classical artists who claim pop pieces and perform them in essentially a classical manner. Actually, she has already shown how to make a sophisticated crossover album: “Haunted Heart,” her 2005 recording of pop songs and standards, mixed in with a couple of classical items, including an excerpt from Berg’s “Wozzeck,” of all things, featuring two jazz artists, the pianist Fred Hersch and the guitarist Bill Frisell.

Ms. Fleming has fared well with her ventures into jazz . But w hy did she undertake this current radical transformation?

As she has explained in interviews, the project was not her idea. Metallica’s managers, Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch, had long wanted to pair a classically trained singer with rock songwriters. After listening to some of the songs, she was intrigued enough to speak with the producer David Kahne. “David is so thoughtful and articulate that I become even more fascinated by the prospect of exploring a completely different use of my voice,” she writes in her liner notes.

They settled on 11 songs, chosen for their suitability for her voice, the meaning of the lyrics and overall qualities of mystery and elusiveness that reminded her of classical works she loves - songs like “Intervention” by Arcade Fire, “With Twilight as My Guide” by the Mars Volta, and a few older pieces, like Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” and, in a bold move, the Jefferson Airplane ballad “Today.”

Adapting Ms. Fleming’s voice to rock took hard work. She and Mr. Kahne realized that it was best for her to sing in the range of her speaking voice, which is sometimes two octaves lower.

Ms. Fleming and her producers deserve credit for taking a risk. It’s time for them to call “Dark Hope” what it is: a crossover album.


By ANTHONY TOMMASINI