CLASSICAL
Renée Fleming has deep ties to Houston.
After singing at the Super Bowl, the Olympics, a Nobel Prize ceremony and for Queen Elizabeth II, Renée Fleming took over last year as co-artistic director of the Aspen Music Festival. Her partner there is Houston Grand Opera artistic and music director Patrick Summers, so the star soprano — guest of honor at the Houston Symphony’s Opening Night gala on Saturday — has often found herself reflecting on the city that saw many of her early triumphs.
“Almost every conversation, I end up talking about some really formative experience that I had (in Houston), because I premiered so much important repertoire for me there,” Fleming says. “It was an incredibly important formative part of my training, my career and in my life experience. I have a strong attachment to Houston.”
Fleming’s list of accolades is among the most distinguished in all of classical music. For more than three decades, she’s balanced performances at the world’s leading opera houses with forays into pop, jazz, musical theater and film soundtracks. Offstage, she’s become a leading advocate for research into music’s mysterious connections with science and medicine.
As an artistic adviser to the Kennedy Center, Fleming worked with the National Institute of Health to create Sound Health, an initiative that studies, among other things, music’s effectiveness in helping treat conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries. During the pandemic, she also hosted “Music and Mind,” an online series in which she discussed a variety of related topics — “Music, Loneliness, and Isolation,” “The Power of Rhythm” — with prominent scientists, academics, physicians and musicians.
Approaching music from a more scientific and therapeutic point of view has only increased her appreciation that much more, Fleming says.
“There are just so many interesting things,” she explains. “How is it that Neanderthals had the same vocal mechanism that I do? And how did vocalization begin? What was the purpose? All of these things are things that science is beginning to uncover.”
Still, so much comes back to Houston, where Fleming made her role debut as the Countess in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” for Houston Grand Opera in 1988. Three years later, she sang the part again, besides appearing in “Don Giovanni” and the title role of Dvorâk’s “Rusalka” that same year. Later, HGO turns came in Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella,” Verdi’s “La Traviata,” and the company’s 50th anniversary gala in 2005.
“It had such a sense of family,” Fleming says of HGO. “The houses that we are happy to return to are those that make us feel the most welcome. Since then, I’ve mourned the fact that I haven’t often heard Mozart operas performed with such dynamic detail, and that attention to rhythm and dynamics is what makes them really come alive.”
With the Houston Symphony, Sept. 11 will be Fleming’s eighth appearance, including the 2013 Opening Night gala. Another crucial career moment came in 1995, when she recorded a stunning version of Strauss’ “Four Last Songs” with the orchestra, then under the direction of Christoph Eschenbach.
Eschenbach had studied under the great Hungarian-born maestro George Szell and wanted their recording to sound as expansive as the one Szell made with Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fleming recalls.
“I was really excited and happy to be in that template,” she says. “The orchestra played beautifully, too.”
Houston Symphony principal Pops conductor Steven Reineke will conduct Opening Night this year. He and Fleming have previously worked together on “American Voices,” her Kennedy Center program that reached across several genres to broaden classical music’s reach. For Saturday, she says, “Because it’s Steven, we wanted to keep the program sort of fun.”
Selections range from Handel and John Corigliano’s setting of Kitty O’Meara’s lockdown poem “And the People Stayed Home” to theatrical numbers by Kander and Ebb and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Fleming will conclude with a solo arrangement of Andrew Pippa’s “The Diva,” which she originally performed as a duet with Vanessa Williams.
Finally, Fleming even has family here: her younger brother sings in the HGO Chorus. But there’s more.
“The other funny connection is that when I was pregnant with my second child,” Fleming says. “I think that was when I was singing my first ‘Rosenkavalier.’ We were staying at an apartment complex on Sage Road, so I called her Sage.
“So I’m very connected to Houston.”