Last Saturday, I went to hear the American soprano Deborah Voigt in recital at the Barbican. She has been newsy of late, not least because of her decision - following a much-publicised fracas about her once large figure - to undergo major gastric bypass surgery in order to lose a substantial amount of weight. Less newsy, however, is the fact that Voigt, in addition to tackling some of the most taxing roles in the operatic repertoire, has recently taken to cabaret, and accordingly gave her London fans an indication of just what one of her gigs might be like.
After delivering - somewhat variably in my opinion - a selection of songs by Mozart, Verdi, Strauss, Respighi and the underrated American composer Amy Beach, she turned to Bernstein and Broadway numbers. She gave us So Pretty, which Bernstein wrote in 1968, not for a classical singer, but for Barbara Streisand. After that, came numbers from On The Town and West Side Story. Her encores included Can't Help Loving That Mine of Mine, from Jerome Kern's Showboat. She did all of them to perfection, the audience adored it, and I, for one, wanted to hear more.
Here, in short, was a major classical artist venturing into that tricky territory we define as 'crossover', and the fact that she succeeded so well in it begs inevitable questions about both our understanding of the idea and our response to it. Crossover is a word guaranteed to have many running screaming for cover at its very mention, but we also have to admit that, in an age in which we are told the barriers between classical and popular music, are crumbling, we use it nebulously and, usually, dismissively. It carries inevitable overtones of major classical artists slumming it for the sake of their bank balances, and also manages to embrace singers who call themselves classical artists - one thinks of Katherine Jenkins, Russell Watson, Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli - who don't regularly perform anything we consider to be classical repertoire, and, in the case of Bocelli, tend to come unstuck on occasions when they do.
Whether crossover can work or not is ultimately dependent on the singer's ability to master a style different from that with which we associate them. The great Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson once recorded I Could Have Danced All Night from My Fair Lady (with Herbert von Karajan conducting, believe it or not), and it sounded eccentric, simply because you were aware that this was Isolde posing as Eliza Doolittle. Placido Domingo, similarly, sounds overly operatic when making forays away from his usual repertoire. In the case of singers like Jenkins, the process is reversed: it's the consciously operatic quality of her delivery that sits so uneasily with material in which, more often than not, we might expect a crooner or a diseuse, if any of us wanted to listen to it at all. Crossing over isn't, by any means, solely the province of the classically trained, though such forays are rare and usually unsuccessful. 'Classical Barbara' wasn't Streisand's best album, by any means, and Michael Bolton's disc of operatic arias was perverse to put it mildly.
When you listen to singers like Voigt tackling numbers from musicals, however, you're aware of something very different happening. She doesn't sound like a Wagner-Strauss diva out of her field, but like someone on a Broadway or West End stage, who has been singing musicals all her life. The point is that she has completely assimilated the relevant style, and she's by no means alone. I've heard Renee Fleming do Duke Ellington and Judy Garland like someone born to it. Anne Sofie von Otter, wonderful as Carmen and in Handel and Brahms, once did a fabulously grungy folk gig at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and has recently released a disc of cover versions of Abba (not all of it works, but she's fantastic in The Day Before You Came). Sylvia McNair, sublime in Purcell, is also a phenomenal jazz singer. It cuts the other way, too. Am I alone in admiring Cleo Laine, that matchlessly intelligent artist, singing Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and songs by Charles Ives?
Perhaps we need to re-define our ideas of crossover, since, in my opinion, we should by no means be dismissing all of it out of hand. After all, if it's stylistically appropriate and done with passionate commitment, then great singing is great singing. Isn't it?
