Renée Fleming, Barbican, London, review If you love for beauty, oh, do not love me. So pleads one of Mahler's Rückert-Lieder. And as Renée Fleming sang the line at this recital, I wondered whether the superstar soprano's singing isn't exactly the sort that demands to be loved for its beauty. But in this concentrated selection of lieder - written by a handful of composers who charted the rise and fall of Viennese modernism - Fleming showed that she's not just about the languorous legato, luscious top notes and frocks, even if none of those was in short supply. A first half of Wolf and Mahler and a second of rarely heard songs by early Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Korngold represented austere programming for a world-beating diva like Fleming. It is also repertoire that's fraught with pitfalls for singers more at home on the opera stage: there's nowhere to hide with just piano accompaniment (provided here by the expert but anonymously subservient Maciej Pikulski). Fleming's control was largely impeccable, though, even if the artlessness that some bring to this repertoire eluded her. But if she was forced to adopt a rather arch, actorly manner in some of Wolf's Goethe songs, her way with Mahler's Rückert settings was more relaxed. Here, tonal beauty was allied to honestly affecting interpretation. The artistry after the interval was no less impressive, even if the repertoire was not quite so compelling. Schoenberg was represented by just two early songs, of which the second, the ballad Jane Grey, brought the most impassioned performance. But the soprano failed to bring the underrated Zemlinsky's earnestly overwrought Dehmel settings to life. There was some glorious singing in Korngold's Was du mir bist, dedicated, Fleming told us in one of her easy-going interjections, by the wunderkind to his mother (one wonders what Freud would have had to say about that). But she couldn't make these songs especially memorable, either, until we came to Walzer aus Wien's Frag mich oft - a Johann Strauss pastiche and a sort of high-class Viennese answer to Maybe it's Because I'm a Londoner - which was tossed off with disarming charm. More Korngold followed as a third encore, an exquisitely self-indulgent and silky account of Marietta's Lied from Die tote Stadt. OK, then, do love me for beauty, it seemed to say.