Her lustrous voice, often doubled with string lines, evokes dark and thrilling mysteries, especially when a signature phrase from Tristan and Isolde floats by.
Other groups usually pair the Lyric Suite with the music of Berg's 12-tone colleagues Schoenberg and Webern; the Emersons have chosen Teutonic rarities.
You won't be hearing Egon Wellesz (1885-1974) in concert halls any time soon but the Austrian's highly saturated harmonic palette is the perfect complement to that of Berg.
Wellesz's 1934 Sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning takes six of the poet's Sonnets from the Portuguese, translated by Rainer Maria Rilke, and invests them with a middle-European gravitas.
You'll be swept away in the first, when the dense atonal textures miraculously lighten for Fleming to praise the power of love over death. The capricious third setting, with musical images of crickets singing to mandolins, inspires a dazzling piece of writing in the style of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.
Eric Zeisl's Come sweet death is a short and moving coda, written by a Jewish composer who exchanged Nazi Germany for the Hollywood studio system. Ironically, this short, sweet chorale setting, lusciously delivered, is curiously close to the Negro spiritual encores popular with other divas. A nice touch.
Verdict: After distributing lollipops in Wellington, an American soprano reveals her serious side on disc.
