Credit where it’s due to the diva who can leave an audience happy when for most of the evening they had been waiting for her to appear rather than applauding any actual singing. But even Renée Fleming’s rather brittle conclusion to a bitty Festival Hall recital provoked coos of delight. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have one encore,” she announced with brisk and rather over-efficient finality. Perhaps the fact that the single extra was Puccini’s O mio babbino caro — delivered with delightfully cosy charm and all of the plush tone that is the Fleming calling card — was the reason why nobody minded.

Well, it was that sort of evening. It’s possible that the 50-year-old Fleming (clad in a majestic creation by Vivienne Westwood, she looked at least ten years younger) is now husbanding some vocal resources — hence a more compact display of soprano lustre than her last London recital. But lustre there still was, and the gleam of undeniable star power.

The bulk of the programme was drawn from her latest album, Verismo, and if Fleming’s cultivated allure is never going to be ideal for the fire and fury of these Italian ladies, you can’t fault her musicianship or hard work with characterisation. No, she hasn’t the dramatic heft to bark out a chesty line such as “tutto è finito” (“it’s all over”) in the despairing rage of Puccini’s dying Manon Lescaut, but she did summon up all the wistful passion of this onetime goodtime gal. And she has found a good fit in some of the lesser-known music from Puccini’s era: a winsome morsel from Giordano’s Siberia was simply, delicately transporting; two short, flirty extracts from Leoncavallo’s La Bohème were skilfully (though not exactly memorably) dispatched.

More of that rep would have been helpful ballast. As it was, the letter scene from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin had to act as the meat and potatoes of the recital. The opera has long been a Fleming favourite, and she sang this extract with fabulous assurance, even if her rather knowing portrayal painted a Tatyana both drunk on love and aware of exactly how many units she had imbibed.

Otherwise we relied on fleshy contributions from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Charles Dutoit, effective when accompanying Fleming, but overexerted in thumping extracts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Tchaikovsky’s overture on the same theme. There’s a discernible rapport between orchestra and their new principal conductor (the fine playing from the section principals attested to that), but let’s hope future outings show that Dutoit can fashion more subtle readings of repertory staples than this concert demonstrated.

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