Regina Nathan's recital at the NCH on Thursday may have included only seven of the originally advertised 16 items (and none of the German language ones), but it still ranged far and wide.
The evening began with Handel, veered into Charpentier and Poulenc, and then charted a zig-zag course through Louigny, Weill, Tauber, Verdi, Catalani, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak and traditional Irish songs, before returning to Verdi at the end.
It wasn't an easy course for the singer, whose intonation was suspect with a frequency I found disturbing, and whose limited communication of stylistic distinctions meant that some of the evening's contrasts had more to do with the contrivances of vocal art than the requirements of the music.
Regina Nathan has reliably strong and strident high notes and control in exposed altitude at the other end of the dynamic spectrum, too.
But there is only so much vocal life to be lived in the stratosphere. Nathan takes the music of Broadway and traditional Irish material rather too far into the operatic world.
The diseuse's narrative gifts, flexing words in a heightened conversational manner, do not appear to be among her skills. And in delivering the messages of opera, in Handel ("Pianger la sorte mia") as much as Verdi ("E strano . . . sempre libera"), she can incline to overkill.
The adaptation of vocal resources to musical and dramatic needs was at its tightest in "Arrigo! ah parli a un core" from Verdi's "I vespri siciliani", where the pathos was touchingly caught and expressed through finely spun tone. Sadly, nothing else in the programme, attentively accompanied by Linnhe Robertson on piano, came remotely near the same level of expressive musical potency.
