Pardon my French, but Screaming Sopranos are fundamental. It just does not feel like opera without them. And, with a voice that often overflows concert halls, nowadays nobody screams like Sondra Radvanovsky. Still, in Aix she seeks to rebrand herself as a recitalist, an intimate performer who shares her life with a cozy audience.

It is tricky to jump from Verdian Opera to recitals. Many singers have managed to sing both repertoires all their careers, but Radvanovsky has not. It is hard to believe that one of the most in-demand—and popular—sopranos of today has only one studio album under her belt. Now she aims to prove her versatility while still beseeching from the audience a certain patience; she still has a few things to figure out.

More than everyone’s favorite screaming diva, Radvanovsky is one of the singers who most exudes a compelling vulnerability on the opera stages. Her singing is drastic. Her talent makes us wonder whether she will be able to finish a given phrase (she always can); each loud screaming note is a small victory—as if she challenged death herself and won. Her lower range, so amazingly queer, deserves to be a color in the rainbow flag. It is all a victory for theater and theatricality.

Given how exposed she makes herself on the operatic stage, it is surprising that Radvanovsky wanted to let us know even more about herself in a recital—did we not know enough already? What remains of the woman who hides behind the diva on stage?

Instead of sharing her other musical self, she seemed to aim to expose her private life: the loss of her mother and friends, the meeting of her current partner, etc. There must be a public for this over-sharing performance (especially in talk-show America), but I am not it. It is not that I am not interested; Radvanovsky’s experiences are almost collective (perhaps only the lucky and infants do not know the horror of losing a parent), but I think it is precisely this mundane universality of what she said that made me miss hearing more precisely what makes Sondra so extraordinarily herself—and nobody else. She said everything without revealing anything. And it is evident that Radvanovsky has more profound things to say about an aria or lied than “this is about hope or loss.”

 A Work in Progress

Her incursions outside of her comfort zone showed that her repertoire is still a work-in-progress. Sporting a less-than-optimum German, struggling to find the proportions between consonants and vowels, piano and forte, her Strauss lieder was the weakest part of the night. The Rachmaninoff romanzas were almost opera arias. And the extremely correct “Piangerò” from “Giulio Cesare” clearly did not worship in the same church as the early music specialists who dominated Aix-en-Provence. The congenial Anthony Manoli on the piano did not do her many favors, either. With a muddy and even “loungy” phrasing, Handel and Strauss sounded imprecise and clumsy.

The opening act, Dido’s “Lament,” was heavy and unrefined—a trial to hear, especially given how the piece’s solemn and sublime bass line is imprinted on one’s memory. Manoli is certainly a skilled coach and reliable pianist, but he was also at the edges of his piano skills for most of the night.

Yet, when Radvanovsky sang Liszt’s “Petrarch sonnets,” she seemed to have encountered the gateway that could make her a recitalist: being dramatic. While feigning anxiety in the middle of “Pace non trovo,” she seemed to realize that her singing is forever linked with over-the-top theater. Even the most sublime “I’ vidi in terra” would have much to gain from her operatic persona. Some Verdian sopranos can escape melodrama when singing lieder (Eliane Coelho, more recently); Radvanovksy does not. And that is a good thing; it is perhaps her original contribution to the repertoire.

After singing a song composed by herself and Jackie Heggie (“If I had known”) that was as melodramatic as a “Grey’s Anatomy” season finale, Radvanovsky sang her usual verismo and Verdian opera arias in a Sokolovian number of encores. It was so mesmerizing that I barely blinked. Even with some minor struggles in sustaining her world-famous pianissimi (it happens even to the best), it was such a vivid performance, with such mastery that people in the balcony seemed to explode in joy. Her hugely loud voice conveyed an ineffable emotion that transcends bodies and makes the timpani in our ears ringing like heartbeats. It is not evident that she will make a career singing Strauss, Mahler, and—why not?—Wagner, but if she manages to do so, it will certainly be a German repertoire such as no one has heard before.