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Pressed for her views on a disappointing concert by the incomparable Giuditta Pasta, nineteenth-century diva Pauline Viardot likened Pastas performance to da Vinci's Last Supper: "a wreck of a picture," she said, but still "the greatest picture in the world." Shuffling the terms may yield a fair assessment of Renee Fleming's Imogene in the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Bellini's Il Pirata: a great singer, but the evening was still something of a wreck.
Granted, the twenty-five-year-old composer's score probably has never been sung by a lovelier voice. Flemings vocalism, at its best, was of awesome beauty: iridescent pianissimos, buttery tone and shipshape ...