Classical

Bring the noise!

This season, superstar soprano Renée Fleming claims the city as her own, rocking the Met and appearing on the side of a bus near you.

By Steve Smith

Renée Fleming in Massenet’s Thaïs

Photograph: Brigitte Lacombe/Metropolitan Opera

Taking Renée Fleming for granted is far too easy. We should know; we’ve been doing it for years. A prominent lyric soprano for more than two decades, Fleming, 49, has been a creative force at the Metropolitan Opera since the mid-’90s. She is without question the reigning American opera singer worldwide, and one of the few to attain a broader general appeal. At a time when the memory of Beverly Sills guest-hosting The Tonight Show verges on the surreal, Fleming sings on Letterman, and Daniel Boulud has named a dessert after her.

Ironically, the trappings of celebrity have made it easy to overlook Fleming’s serious artistic contributions. We admired her moxie in tackling offbeat roles in Bellini’s Il Pirata and Handel’s Rodelinda, but wrote about her collaborators. During Peter Gelb’s first two seasons as general manager of the Met, Fleming’s presence seemed to diminish among the subway-station posters and Times Square simulcasts—not to mention the furor over recent arrivals like Anna Netrebko and Natalie Dessay.

Not so, Fleming asserts in a telephone call from Tanglewood. “I sang Traviata and Otello at the Met last season, which is more than usual,” she says. “You may not have realized it because neither one was broadcast, but in fact it was a lot of performances.” The same was true the previous year: Her appearances in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin contributed to sold-out houses and a successful movie-theater simulcast, later released on DVD.

One thing’s for sure: Fleming will be impossible to overlook this season. You’ll see her face plastered all over town as the Met’s figurehead, crowned with the leonine mane she’ll be wearing in Massenet’s Thaïs, which opens December 8. “When I actually see it I’ll have to deal with it, but at this point I’m thinking it must be a mistake,” Fleming says with genuine modesty. “I’m sure they’ll change their minds and it’ll be a different campaign.”

Fat chance: Thaïs, a sexy rarity by French composer Jules Massenet, is one of two operas in which Fleming will grace the stage, in a production that’s being imported from the Lyric Opera of Chicago expressly for her. The other, Dvorak’s Rusalka (coming in March), is one of her signature roles; when she last did it here in 2004, every show sold out. Prior to those appearances, the singer will star in the Met’s opening-night gala on September 22, performing in one act apiece from Verdi’s La Traviata and Massenet’s Manon, and a third opera indicative of the repertoire she now favors, Richard Strauss’s Capriccio. (A new CD of Strauss’s Four Last Songs will come out a week before the gala.)

That Gelb is soldiering on with a glamorous event put in place by the previous regime, rather than the new productions he prefers, is proof of his fervent wish to keep Fleming busy here. “She is under such demand to do more-lucrative recitals and different types of projects,” Gelb explains. “She’d cut back on appearances at the Met before I was hired. One of my first acts as manager was to have lunch with her and persuade her to increase her performances.”

This being an opening night at Gelb’s house, mediagenic lures are being cast far and wide. Through a collaboration with Vogue chief Anna Wintour, Fleming will be adorned in costumes designed by Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano and Christian Lacroix. Coinciding with opening night, Coty will release a new perfume, La Voce by Renée Fleming. Each cute little bottle will command a stiff $200, with part of the proceeds benefiting the Met.

Fleming accepts the glitz pragmatically because, as she points out, media attention for the arts is drying up. “A hundred years ago, singers were advertising fragrances and even cigarettes, because they were huge stars,” she says. (Shrewdly, this star recently signed with the talent agency Paradigm to pursue opportunities outside the musical world.)

Still, now that Fleming’s name is on a flower (the Renée Fleming Iris), a dessert and a fragrance, is there any place else she’d like to leave it? She answers with no hesitation. “The most awe-inspiring moment for me was looking at [the score for] Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and seeing Eleanor Steber’s name at the top of it,” she says. “I just thought, That’s what we’re supposed to do. To be involved in a masterpiece that could survive time would be the greatest thrill of all.”

The Metropolitan Opera Opening Night Gala will be held on Sept 22.

NEXT: Feel the Bern Leonard Bernstein was this city. A new fest proves he was a whole lot more, too.»

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