Credit: Ken Howard
There was a lot of audience clapping and swooning going on at the Arlington Theatre February 1 when Renée Fleming walked on stage with pianist Howard Watkins and gave a multimedia performance that encapsulated environmental preservation accompanied by enlightened singing – captured by a Miroirs CA correspondent.
In addition to a stellar career as Diva Assoluta, she is a World Health Organization Ambassador for Arts and Health and will have a book release in April called Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness – which she is promoting at recital appearances this month in California that include Cal Performances in Berkeley on the 9th and La Jolla Music Society on the 13th and 14th.
Fleming’s Arlington Theatre concert was originally scheduled in the town’s Granada Theatre but due to the stage being flooded from a sprinkler gone awry, the roomy Arlington Theatre down the street was the next best choice. The program notes included her reminiscence about the impact of seeing the film Soylent Green at age fourteen, set to a musical score that featured Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Grieg. As such, the evening was in two halves: nature and save the planet, with live voice accompaniment to beautiful earth photography filmed by the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas Project. After intermission, she performed a medley of handpicked songs and arias with the ease of a true crossover artist.
In the program’s first half, Fleming’s new work Anthropocene is a joint project of talent and onstage projection that combined singing, lyrics and visual images of polar bears in their ice world, scenes of fire and a lion tending to her cubs. The multimedia concept is an example of how great artists are joining the chorus of voices speaking out for the serious problems facing life on earth. It was a knockout and breathtaking to hear Fleming’s voice melding with images and lyrics about love and beauty, which offered a stark reminder about a shared responsibility to keep our planet whole and healthy. The musical aspect was enhanced by Fleming’s vocalizing to songs such as Before the Deluge (Jackson Browne), Care selve from Atalanta (Handel), Endless Space (Nico Muhly) and What the World Needs Now (Burt Bacharach and Hal David). The whole interlude seemed like Lent: a celebration of life on earth motivated by Fleming’s lending a voice to the issue of our world and our planet - without preaching but just telling it like it is.
After intermission, Fleming, wearing a glittering gold dress, performed a selection of works from the American songbook, jazzy Broadway hits, well-known opera arias and art songs such as O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi (Puccini), Au bord de l’eau, Op. 8, No. 1 (Faure), Zur Rosenzeit (Grieg), All The Things You Are (Jerome Kern) and The Diva (Andrew Lippa) – of which her singing/gesturing was a hoot. The program ended with an audience sing-along to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. The evening’s high note is that Renée Fleming is reinventing her career and her talent in following a new path that involves music as a means of invoking the power of nature as a memorial to earth. As one of our most beloved opera stars, she is giving us more of herself in a powerful and loving way.