Moved by Mysterious Forces

* 1/2

“Star-Crossed Lovers”

Placido Domingo, tenor; Renee Fleming, soprano; Daniel Barenboim, conductor, piano; Chicago Symphony Orchestra

London

This weird concoction should have been called “Star Turns”--the world’s most highly publicized soprano and its hardest-working tenor try to deal with some accountant’s notion of something for everyone. Foremost in this tossed salad of material, mostly assembled from a soon-to-be-televised concert in Chicago, are excerpts from “West Side Story,” in which we hear overwrought operatic voices crushing the Broadway-designed songs and Barenboim’s ponderous pacing of disembodied sections of ballet music. Two Federico Moreno Torroba songs are drenched with Spanish atmosphere and given marvelous renditions by Domingo. But Fleming’s stabs at jazz feeling in three Duke Ellington songs consist of swooping portamentos that come in for random landings, and Barenboim is a stiff as a jazz pianist. Still, the collection shines when the leading Otello of our time encounters Fleming’s radiant Desdemona, and when her Marguerite meets his Faust. It shouldn’t have been hard to put these performers together with a coherent program on tragic love--opera is full of such entanglements--instead of this ill-matched eclectic circus.

*

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