Fleming, Renee

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    Renée Fleming, Star Soprano, Tries Out the Director’s Chair

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    A young soprano was rehearsing a difficult aria from Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” when the director stopped her and made a suggestion.“I always liked to lay down for this part,” the director said, “because it lets the body relax.”It’s not every opera director who can talk about performing choices in the first person. But on that summer afternoon in Aspen, Colo., the woman staging the scene was Renée Fleming, perhaps the most famous soprano of recent decades. Fleming was passing on a career’s worth of accumulated wisdom to a cast in which the oldest singer is 32.Among her lessons was when to say no.“Just remember, you’re going to be more nervous onstage than you are now,” Fleming said as the group worked on some aerobics-style choreography for the production, set in the early 1980s. “So maybe don’t do these jumps, because even if you can sing while you’re doing them now, you’re going to be out of breath on opening night.”Fleming is making her directing debut with this “Così,” which opens on Monday at the Wheeler Opera House as part of the Aspen Music Festival and School, one of the country’s most prestigious summer programs for rising artists.The soprano Lauren Carroll (left, with Fleming) is singing Fiordiligi, Fleming’s old role.Matthew Defeo for The New York TimesShe joins a select group of divas (and divos) turned directors. This fall, the tenor Rolando Villazón’s production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” comes to the Metropolitan Opera. And the mezzo Denyce Graves is staging Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” for Washington National Opera next year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: New York Philharmonic, Renée Fleming and a Sub Conductor

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      Brett Mitchell led the New York Philharmonic in the local premiere of a song cycle by Kevin Puts, featuring the soprano Renée Fleming.The final weeks of an orchestra’s season can feel like the end of school: Everyone’s worn down and summer is beckoning. Last week’s program at the New York Philharmonic had that mood even before a late-breaking curveball that tested the orchestra further.The Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena was to be on the podium for the New York debut of Kevin Puts’s “The Brightness of Light,” an orchestral song cycle featuring the soprano Renée Fleming and the baritone Rod Gilfry, along with Ravel’s rapturous “Daphnis et Chloé.”But the Philharmonic announced on Thursday afternoon — just a day before the concerts — that Mena would not be conducting. No reason was provided, and his management did not respond to inquiries. (In January, Mena disclosed his diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.)Instead, the conductor Brett Mitchell, the music director of California’s Pasadena Symphony and a newcomer to the Philharmonic, stepped in. Mitchell possesses the right credentials, having led “The Brightness of Light” at the Colorado Symphony with Fleming and Gilfry in 2019. Still, this was no easy task given his truncated rehearsal time and lack of familiarity with the players.“The Brightness of Light” is a portrait of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. For the libretto, Puts uses selections from their correspondence — from the heady rush of their early relationship through its souring and O’Keeffe’s deepening romance with the landscape of New Mexico. (This work expands on an earlier piece with Fleming, “Letters,” that relies solely on O’Keeffe’s perspective.)Puts, who also wrote the opera “The Hours” with Fleming in mind, adores her voice’s glowing luminosity; his orchestral writing often bathes her in shining halos of sound, and on Friday she returned the favor. Gilfry, who was also making his New York Philharmonic debut, handled Stieglitz with polish, though the role functions as little more than a foil for O’Keeffe’s personal and artistic evolution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Issa Rae Cancels Kennedy Center Appearance After Trump’s Takeover

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      President Trump’s takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has prompted an outcry in the cultural community, with several artists resigning their posts or canceling engagements at the center.Mr. Trump made himself chairman of the center on Wednesday, a few days after he purged the board of Biden appointees. The new board, stacked with Trump loyalists, elected Mr. Trump chairman and fired the Kennedy Center’s longtime president, Deborah F. Rutter. The board named Richard Grenell, who was ambassador to Germany during the first Trump administration, interim president.The new leadership has moved swiftly to reshape the Kennedy Center’s upper ranks. In addition to Ms. Rutter, several other longtime staff members were fired on Wednesday, including top officials overseeing public relations and governance.Here’s a look at the stars who have resigned from the Kennedy Center or canceled shows in the wake of Mr. Trump’s takeover:Issa RaeMs. Rae, the actress, writer and comedian, announced on social media on Thursday that she was canceling an engagement next month at the Kennedy Center, “An Evening With Issa Rae.” She said that tickets would be refunded.“Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I’ve decided to cancel my appearance at this venue,” she wrote on Instagram.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Three New Books Make the Case for Music as Medicine

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      Three new books make the case for music as medicine. In “The Schubert Treatment,” the most lyrical of the trio, a cellist takes us bedside with the sick and the dying.My colleague Dwight Garner is a great connoisseur of the quotation. I find myself stumbling around this week in the dark corners of the misquotation. Music may indeed have charms to “soothe the savage beast,” as is oft-declared, but the line actually ends “a savage breast,” and is attributable not to William Shakespeare, but to William Congreve, from his 1697 play “The Mourning Bride.”Now you know.Music’s soothing and stimulating effect — its use as a kind of medicine — is the subject of at least three books published this year. This is not a new therapy, but a blooming hot spot of research.I’ve been poking around there for a while, curious to figure out why my mother, a retired professional violist and pianist with advancing dementia, retains so much of her memory (including the ability to sight-read) in this particular realm. She still plays weekly string quartets and piano duos and sings in perfect harmony with Alexa’s somewhat middlebrow choices, though an old game of name-the-composer has faded.THE SCHUBERT TREATMENT: A Story of Music and Healing (Greystone, $24.95), by the cellist and art therapist Claire Oppert, is a slim but shimmery account of performing on her “forever instrument” for a series of patients with varied afflictions, including the inevitable final one.Oppert’s father was a beloved company doctor for several theaters in Paris, who himself played the piano, and she has worked with Howard Buten, a professional clown, novelist and psychologist specializing in autism. (This field teems with polymaths.) Though she tangles dutifully with charts, data and analytics, her philosophy is holistic: “trust and gratitude before the splendor of all things: This is life’s foundation, its bedrock.”Or, more bluntly: “Ten minutes of Schubert is the equivalent of five milligrams of oxy,” the chief of the palliative care unit at a Paris hospital tells her. (Maybe this is why Donald J. Trump played “Ave Maria” at that recent rally-turned-swayfest.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tanglewood Opens for the Summer, With Change in the Air

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      The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave its first concerts of the Tanglewood season, which is already showing signs of its new leader’s ambitions.Tanglewood, the lush summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, opened its season this past weekend, and it did so with one of the most Tanglewood programs imaginable.James Taylor was present to celebrate July 4, of course, and he was celebrating five decades of singing at the venue this year. On Friday night, the orchestra gave an evening of Beethoven under its music director, Andris Nelsons; on Sunday, Renée Fleming, no less, was on hand to cap a matinee of Strauss.In between, the Boston Pops offered a glorious review of recent Broadway musicals, with Victoria Clark bringing down the house as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George III in “Hamilton.” Fellows attending the Tanglewood Music Center gave their first concerts, joining a lineage that stretches back to 1940.The crowds chattered amiably, the grounds were resplendent, and the music was good. What could feel more timeless than this?Sneaking through the shrubbery, however, was the light breeze of change. Chad Smith, the Boston Symphony’s ambitious new president and chief executive, plans to return this august institution to its most radical roots. Should Smith have his way, Tanglewood will see its creaking theater refurbished and put to good use, its Linde Center for Music and Learning pressed into service year-round, and Seranak, Serge Koussevitzky’s old home in the hills, restored as a meeting place for artists and the public.This will take years, and tens of million of dollars, but for now, even one of the coloring sheets that volunteers offer eager children has heard the message: a butterfly, yet to be filled in, with the tagline “A Summer Tradition Transformed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘The Hours’ Returns to the Met Opera With Its Stars

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      Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato reprised their roles in Kevin Puts’s adaptation of the award-winning novel and film.Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which had its stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera last season and returned for its first revival on Sunday, is even prettier than I remember.In the often exquisite score, the strings throb and the woodwinds flutter. When Puts reaches for percussion instruments, he chooses the sweeter ones — glockenspiel, crotales, chimes, vibraphone — and combines them luxuriously. Woodwinds at the top of Act II are practically Wagnerian in their extravagant stateliness. Tender piano chords toll lonesomely. Musical surges are thick with nostalgia. The luscious vocal lines revel in love, and understanding, of the human voice.But it’s easy to miss the score’s manifold beauties when the stage is full of distractions. Extraneous dancers and supernumeraries flood Phelim McDermott’s production at the Met. In one moment, the choreographer Annie-B Parson has them twirl around holding pillows while a character considers killing herself in a hotel room. Adding to the busyness, Puts heavily features the chorus as a collective, omniscient narrator and the characters’ inner voices. As a device, it doesn’t work; while the story intimately intertwines the emotional lives of three women, the chorus infringes upon their connection with the audience.It’s almost as though Puts and McDermott are afraid to take a sustained look at their heroines, or that they don’t trust the audience’s attention span. This is especially perplexing considering they have three leads on the order of Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato, who reprised their roles on Sunday. When the stage was free of clutter, their star wattage was dazzling.As Virginia Woolf, DiDonato was a haunted, magisterial presence. Her voice, dark, fulsome and cutting, communicated Woolf’s intellectual depth and her personal demons; there was the insight and occlusion of a novelist at the height of her powers hiding her suicidal ideations from others. As Laura, O’Hara sang with a voice of fine crystal, and while her timbre was a little cloudier than it used to be, she embodied Laura’s fragile nerves and anxious self-loathing. The overall shape of Fleming’s voice remained improbably youthful in its creamy roundness. Her Clarissa was patrician yet superficial, though partial blame rests with the libretto, in which every other word of hers is “flowers” or “party.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kelli O’Hara’s Ties to Opera, From ‘The Gilded Age’ to the Met Stage

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      O’Hara is an unusual kind of triple threat: a star of Broadway and television who is appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of “The Hours.”On the HBO costume drama “The Gilded Age,” Kelli O’Hara plays a New York grande dame forced to choose sides in an opera war: remain at the old guard’s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being built by the nouveau riche they had excluded.When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the nearly completed Met, the camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.O’Hara herself is far more familiar with the Met, at least in its current incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing at the Met for nearly a decade, and is back now for a revival of “The Hours,” starring opposite Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends both.Still, the Met’s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 people, inspires the same wonder in O’Hara as it does in Aurora. Although Aurora never had to fill it. And O’Hara does.“Once I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing,” she said.This was on a recent morning during a break from rehearsals. O’Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would never.) Later she would return to the basement space where she is rehearsing “The Hours,” Kevin Puts’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s time-skipping novel, itself inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which opens May 5.On “The Gilded Age,” O’Hara, left, plays Aurora Fane, a wealthy socialite who is forced to choose sides in the opera war that created the Met. She is shown with Louisa Jacobson.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the Met’s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to show O’Hara a few items from the Met’s founding that would have been familiar to Aurora: a piece of its original stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a box seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the audience thronging the stage.“It was like a rock concert,” O’Hara marveled. “The passion people had.”Opera was not quite O’Hara’s first passion. She went to college intending to study musical theater, but was told that her voice wasn’t built for the pop and rock styles then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated in the Met’s National Council Auditions and made it to the finals at the regional level. But she missed the camaraderie she had experienced in musical theater, so she packed her bags and headed for Broadway.Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of classic musicals including “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” for which she won a Tony. Just this week she received her eighth Tony nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses.”While she did not regret leaving opera, she sometimes wondered how she might have fared on the Met’s stage. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.At the very end of 2014, she had her chance, in a new production of the operetta “The Merry Widow” directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had previously worked on Broadway. She followed that debut with a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was frightening, but O’Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn’t mind a certain amount of fright.“I had to put my backbone straight and have conversations with myself,” she said. “’You can do this. You’re fine. Just keep your nose to the ground and do your work.’”Even as she scaled the heights of Broadway, O’Hara recalled her opera training. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat work paid off. When she sang in “Così,” her “lovely soprano voice and quite good Italian diction” were praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.While opera singers occasionally make the move to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are recent examples), careers rarely flow the other way. And a performer who can do all this and television, too? That’s rarer still.“The Hours,” O’Hara’s first contemporary opera, which premiered in 2022, is a further challenge. O’Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a woman constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some ways, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the role O’Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Kirsten is another woman confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both find freedom where they can.“I’m coming off of over two years now of playing sad women, held women, even Aurora, held back, constricted,” O’Hara said.For O’Hara, opera is not exactly freeing. It’s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she’ll keep pursuing it — for the difficulty, for the terror, for the range of roles. (On TV, she said, she now plays grandmothers. Opera is rather more forgiving.)O’Hara knows that she could fail. Her voice could crack. She might flub a note. But Aurora is brave enough to join the new-money mavens at the Met’s opening. And O’Hara in her way is brave, too. Brave enough to send her bright, unamplified soprano out into thousands of ears each night.“I’m confident enough to want to try,” she said. More

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      Jaap van Zweden Bids Farewell, and Other Classical Highlights

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      The Philharmonic’s maestro ends his tenure, Igor Levit comes to Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Opera takes a chance on reviving two recent hits.The New York Philharmonic’s spring gala is not usually of much musical interest. It tends toward mild fare — just enough to keep the donors happy before dinner and dancing.But this year, the playing will draw closer attention. The gala, on April 24, features the only appearance this season by Gustavo Dudamel, the Philharmonic’s next music director. He will take part in the celebration of the orchestra’s education programs, including its signature Young People’s Concerts, which are turning 100.The Philharmonic has been careful not to have its Dudamel-led future step too much on its less starry present. This season also brings the final months of Jaap van Zweden’s brief tenure as music director, which will begin on his favored ground: the classics.A mid-March program of Mozart’s elegant Piano Concerto No. 17 (with Conrad Tao as soloist) and Beethoven’s deathless Fifth Symphony is such a sure audience pleaser that the Philharmonic is confidently giving it four performances, rather than the usual three.Van Zweden led the orchestra in Beethoven’s Fifth in October 2015, a few months before he got the music director job. I wrote then that “conducting this imaginative and playing this varied don’t appear at Geffen Hall every week.” His meticulousness didn’t come off as mannered, as it sometimes does. The inner two movements felt especially inventive, and I’ll be listening for whether the whole thing has the polish and momentum that have tended to elude the orchestra recently.A few days later, van Zweden will turn his attention to the new, as the Philharmonic plays fresh pieces by Tan Dun — a concerto for the principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi, called “Three Muses in Video Game” — and Joel Thompson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Kennedy Center, an Ode to the Arts, and a Gentle Jab at Biden’s Age

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      Billy Crystal, Renée Fleming, Queen Latifah, Barry Gibb and Dionne Warwick are honored; Robert De Niro joked that Crystal is just a few years younger than the president.Rarely is the president of the United States, nestled in his box, the center of attention at the Kennedy Center Honors, the annual awards ceremony that brings a carousel of celebrities, musicians and actors to the stage to pay tribute to lifetime achievements in the arts.But such was the case on Sunday night, when Robert De Niro, celebrating Billy Crystal’s career, marveled at all the honoree had packed into his career.“You’re only 75,” Mr. De Niro said. “That means you’re just about six years away from being the perfect age to be president.”As President Biden grinned, waved and ruefully shook his finger at Mr. De Niro from the presidential box, members of the audience leaped to their feet with applause — some to gawk at Mr. Biden’s reaction from the front row of the balcony.Billy Crystal attending the Kennedy Center Honors. Robert De Niro noted that Mr. Crystal is nearing the age of the president.Paul Morigi/Getty ImagesIt was the only suggestion of politics in an apolitical, if quintessentially Washington event that sees throngs of dignitaries and politicians gather each year to pay tribute to the arts.On Sunday, the Kennedy Center honored artists who not only revolutionized their genres but transcended them: Billy Crystal, the actor and comedian; Barry Gibb, the musician and songwriter who rose to fame as the eldest member of the Bee Gees; Renée Fleming, the opera singer; Queen Latifah, the rapper, singer and actress; and Dionne Warwick, the singer.Ms. Warwick, who has performed five times at the Kennedy Center and previously appeared at the honors gala to perform tributes to two separate honorees, said her reaction to learning that she would be honored was: “Finally, it’s here!”“It’s a privilege to wear this,” she said, gesturing to the signature rainbow medallion given to each honoree.Missy Elliott, performing at the Kennedy Center. She spoke of Queen Latifah, recalling that for her, Ms. Latifah’s “Ladies First” anthem “was saying, ‘You will respect me.’”Gail Schulman/CBSOne of the quirks of these Honors is that the cast of musicians, actors and singers paying tribute to the honorees are kept secret from the attendees, and even the honorees themselves. On Sunday, a nonstop series of bold-lettered names descended on the stage, including Missy Elliott, Jay Leno, Meg Ryan and Lin-Manuel Miranda.The evening blazed through a Broadway-style medley toasting to Mr. Crystal by Mr. Miranda; a showstopping rendition of “Alfie” by Cynthia Erivo, the Tony and Grammy-award winning singer and actress; tributes to Queen Latifah by Kerry Washington and Rev. Stef and Jubilation, the choir Queen Latifah’s mother had belonged to. It was capped by a stirring rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Tituss Burgess, Christine Baranski and Susan Graham, and a medley of Bee Gees songs by Ariana DeBose.The honorees Dionne Warwick and Renée Fleming.Paul Morigi/Getty ImagesFor Mr. Crystal, the Kennedy Center conjured the Lower East Side onstage, projecting a likeness of Katz’s Delicatessen as a backdrop for Ms. Ryan, Mr. Crystal’s most famous co-star, in their famous scene together.“This scene really came naturally to me,” Ms. Ryan said, to laughter. “I’ve actually never been around anyone who made faking an orgasm easier.”For Mr. Gibb, musicians including Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton and Paul McCartney on Sunday reflected on his extensive list of songs — more than 1,000, with tracks in different genres, like “Islands in the Stream” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” and the Bee Gees hits that made him and his brothers famous.“He taught us how to walk,” Lionel Richie said in a prerecorded video interview, as the famous guitar hook in “Stayin’ Alive” pulsed through the theater.“Kindness and understanding — we seem to be losing that,” Mr. Gibb said. “And we need to grab it back as quickly as possible.”Ms. Fleming, the soprano known as “the people’s diva,” said that she was grateful for the opportunity to highlight the arts.Barry Gibb and Queen Latifah, who were also honored.Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press“Artists really can change hearts and minds and we’re allowed to wrestle with difficult problems and life and death,” Ms. Fleming said. “Because I’m in the opera world, we all die in opera.”But she allowed ahead of the show that she was experiencing a strange reverse form of stage fright. Performing on the world’s biggest stages may be second nature to her, but, she said, “The thing that scares me is sitting in the box!”Queen Latifah, for her part, appeared prepared to soak up the experience. At the State Department dinner on Saturday night, she told attendees how she would “never forget” the moment. And she appeared visibly moved when Ms. Elliott regaled members of the audience on Sunday with the memory of Queen Latifah on television declaring “Ladies first” in her feminist anthem of the same name, at a time when “we kept hearing, ‘It’s a man’s world.’”“She was saying, ‘You will respect me,’” Ms. Elliott said. “‘I will be a leader. I will be a provider. I will be an inspiration to many.’”The show will be broadcast on CBS on Dec. 27. More