Renee Fleming’s new recording, Distant Light, features a work by Samuel Barber along with pieces by Swedish composer Anders Hillborg and — surprisingly — Bjork.
With her 58th birthday approaching on February 14, Fleming’s performances in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier this month at London’s Royal Opera and at the Met this spring could be her last in the standard repertoire.
Distant Light opens with Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a 1948 work set to a text by poet and novelist James Agee and is a perfect fit for Fleming’s silvery, soaring soprano. It links with Hillborg’s The Strand Settings, a 20-minute, four-song cycle debuted by Fleming with the New York Philharmonic in 2013. Locales — a porch on a summer evening, a roof on a house near the sea on a starlit night, bees buzzing at a bus terminal — create a textured, emotional soundscape.
For Bjork’s Virus, Joga and All Is Full of Love, the microphone is much closer to her mouth, creating a contemporary rather than classical sound. The CD ends with two tracks of Fleming melded into a single recording.
Following an administrative track established by her late friend Beverly Sills, Fleming in December 2010 became a vice-president and creative consultant at the Lyric Opera of Chicago; there she curated Jimmy Lopez’s 2015 Bel Canto, based on Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel, an opera that will be televised by PBS on January 13.
Fleming added the role of artistic partner at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, last March.
Could she see herself running an opera company?
“I used to think about that, and I would say never say never, but I think I’m probably more useful doing what I’m doing now rather than focusing in one area,” she said.
