MUSIC REVIEW : Dutch Soprano Elly Ameling in Irvine Recital

Wondrous things still happen when Elly Ameling sings. The internationally celebrated, much beloved and exhaustively recorded Dutch soprano remains, at 55, a model recitalist and a most resourceful purveyor of the song literature.

But time does not stand still. At the singer’s latest local appearance Sunday night in deep Orange County and under auspices of UC Irvine, Ameling showed that she, too, can be human and imperfect.

Her full-length program at South Coast Community Church in Irvine offered solid German and French halves, though the latter proved overgenerous--it contained 17 morceaux --and thus miscalculated. The larger error was in a certain standoffishness in both the content and the performance of the French portion of the evening.

Assisted neatly, considerately and rather anonymously by pianist Rudolf Jansen, Ameling gave careful attention to both enunciation and articulation of Poulenc’s entertaining “Fiancailles pour Rire,” six Greek-inspired melodies by Ravel and Satie’s final set of songs, “Ludions” (1923).

And mechanical inconsistencies now begin to show themselves in Ameling’s once-pristine vocalism. Notes above the staff are neither easy nor reliable; at slower tempos--and Jansen never was an impetuous collaborator--sustained tones can display wear and wobble; not every single color in the vocal palette is still usable.

In the first half, despite a ragged and disappointing Schubert group--marked by an effortful “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” and a shaky, dramatically unrealized “Junge Nonne”--Ameling gave Schumann’s “Frauenliebe undleben” an admirably unfussy and direct reading, full of touching details.