(Renée Fleming returns to Norfolk’s Harrison Opera House for a June 1 performance. Photo by Andrew Ecclesdecca)
By Montague Gammon III
The most celebrated operatic soprano of our time, probably the most celebrated since the days of Maria Callas, comes back to Norfolk June 1, and to the very building in which she had her first, full time singing job after grad school.
Of course that is Renée Fleming, a one time member of Virginia Opera’s Emerging Artists program. She’ll be at the Harrison Opera House for a performance of her one singer plus accompaniment and film program, Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene.
That word is an unofficial term for the geological epoch in which we live, the Age of Humankind. Perhaps coined in the 1980’s, it was put into play in 2000 by an offhand remark Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen made at a scientific conference. The concept dates to the 1870’s, when Italian geologist said that humans had created the “anthropozoic’ era.
“This is a fabulous look at the planet,” Fleming said on Facebook. “National Geographic has made gorgeous films that tell the story of how much we love our planet…something really different and uplifting. And I’m also performing a lot of fun things too, that are…more typical of my performances.”
The film, the Seattle Symphony has written, offers “images from Cape Horn to the Arctic Circle.”
”In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing,” conductor Sir Georg Solti told the New York Times about Fleming in 1997. ”The other was Renata Tebaldi.” Solti won 31 Grammys, more than any musician other than Beyoncé with her 35, and his career did overlap that of Callas.
Fleming has five Grammys and a closely spaced, small-type, multi-page list of other awards that she has racked up over her career. Her definitive, this-is-how-it-should-be-done rendition of our National Anthem at the 2014 Super Bowl let her stadium full of listeners, which still must be the biggest live audience any opera star ever held in the palm of their hands, find out what a great lyric soprano could do with those notorious high notes.
Five years earlier, at the final night of UK’s famous Proms concerts, Fleming dressed as Ms. Britannia herself and showed that highly Anglophilic audience that a Yank who put herself through grad school by singing in jazz clubs could put over “Rule Britannia” so powerfully that they might forget that their Empire was no more.
Handel, Björk, Fauré, and Jerome Kern, Copland and Ives and Burt Bacharach, Nico Muhly, Maria Schneider, and Villa-Lobos, are among the composers mentioned in comments about previous concerts of Anthropocene.
Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene is an outgrowth of Fleming’s 2023 Grammy winning album of the same name on the Decca label. Oussama Zahr’s The New Yorker magazine review of the album said it “uses Romantic and contemporary songs to chart humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world in the face of climate change…as Fleming’s voice floats and blooms with its customary beauty.”
“Great mountain vistas, wild animals in their habitat, and massive schools of fish swimming underwater played out in vivid colors as Fleming sang classical art songs, popular songs, and commissioned songs by Nico Muhly and Kevin Puts,” wrote Ken Herman, reviewing the recital performance of Anthropocene for the award winning website San Diego Story. “Fleming’s gorgeous upper range still offers much of its luster,” he said, adding that “graceful leaps into that register were thrilling.”
Our own Arts Festival website succinctly promises, “One of the most beloved and celebrated singers of our time, 2023 Kennedy Center Honoree and National Medal of Arts recipient Renée Fleming captivates audiences around the world with her sumptuous voice, consummate artistry, and compelling stage presence [i]n this breathtaking performance.”
The Festival website also quotesThe Boston Musical Intelligencer, which called the recital, “”Nothing short of mesmerizing…the music and the stunning film enveloped listeners…engendered awe and wonder.”
Susan Miron, writing for Boston online magazine The Arts Fuse, mentioned the “breathtaking 30-minute video of sumptuous scenery that came very close to upstaging…the humans on stage.”
Then Miron summed up Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene: “It is always a thrill to be in the audience when the legendary American soprano Renée Fleming performs.”
WANT TO GO?
Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene
Renée Fleming, soprano in recital
Presented by Virginia Arts Festival
3:00 p.m., Sunday, June 1
Harrison Opera House, Norfolk
757-282-2822
