MICHEAL DERVANreviews Katherine Jenkins at the National Concert Hall.
Jenkins, Dyversity Orchestra/Inglis
NCH, Dublin
The programme for Welsh mezzo soprano Katherine Jenkins’s concert described her as “a truly global artist”. She is, it stated, “the world’s biggest classical crossover artist”, whose records “have outsold Girls Aloud and the Spice Girls” and who “consistently dominates the classical and pop charts”. Her website goes further, claiming that she “is redefining classical crossover, and is pioneering a new genre of opera superstar”.
This concert was given with the Dyversity Orchestra under conductor Anthony Inglis. The orchestral sound was heavily amplified, the tone often unpleasant (especially from the violin section), and the internal balances always artificial. The orchestra sounded at its best in partnership with the evening’s support artist, the ever sure-fingered accordionist, Dermot Dunne.
Happily, Jenkins’s voice, as relayed courtesy of a microphone that glittered in the lights, came across well. There was, of course, no way of knowing what size of voice was actually involved, a key consideration for singers in an opera house, where being able to soar over an orchestral background is not a matter of someone else moving a fader on a mixing desk.
The voice sounded more comfortable in the smoky depths and the free-sounding middle range than it did on the highest notes, which came across as strained. The delivery itself was not what you would call operatic, even in the opera arias. The style was too short-breathed, and the phrasing too arbitrary for that. And there was little of the individuality of tone or nuance that characterises the best of pop singing. In other words, “new genre of opera superstar” notwithstanding, it’s a case of exactly what it says on the tin: classical crossover. And crossover delights its fans exactly because it pirates elements from different genres, blends apparently conflicting styles, rounds off corners, as it were, in the pursuit of a middle ground that the unconverted tend to find dangerously bland.
Jenkins opened with Amazing Graceand ended with Nessun dorma, offering in between Rossini's Una voce poco fa, Mozart's Laudate Dominum, and a selection of numbers from musicals and films.
The super-charged power of her microphone-assisted low range was arresting when she unleashed it. But the best moment came in a departure from the advertised programme. Before the interval, Jenkins had invited written questions from the audience, and she dealt with a selection of them after the interval. In the middle of all this she yielded to a request for the Welsh National Anthem, where, with the orchestra silent on stage beside her, her singing rose to a new level of passion and vibrancy.