Arts & Events

Renée Fleming is a woman of many talents, a great opera soprano, a thoughtful individual who cares about health, mental health and the environment, a graceful host during Met Opera broadcasts and telecasts, and a passionately intelligent advocate for the preservation of wilderness flora and fauna, including in our oceans. At Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Friday, February 9, Renée Fleming brought all these multi-faceted sides of her personality to the forefront in a remarkable concert, the first half of which presented a multi-media hymn to nature that Ms Fleming made in collaboration with the National Geographic Society. This work was entitled Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene., which was also the title of her Grammy Award-winning recording with conductor Yannick Nézet Séguin for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for 2023, 

The multi-media version offered in Berkeley presented amazing National Geograhic video footage of many different aspects of wilderness and nature, including footage shot from low-flying aircraft, time-lapse photography, underwater videography, and much more. Musically, this work offered a mixed bag that included an aria by Handel, a lovely Bailero from Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, and songs by such diverse composers as Jackson Browne, Hazel Dickens, Nico Muhly, Maria Schneider, Bjork, Howard Shore, Kevin Puts, Curtis Green, and Burt Bacharach. Renée Fleming’s soprano voice deftly navigated all this diverse musical material, brilliantly accompanied by American pianist Howard Watkins. Meanwhile the visuals never failed to grip our attention. Although I have never been a fan of adding visual material to classical music, especially not as it was frequently done by Michael Tilson Thomas during his long reign as Music Director at San Francisco Symphony, I must applaud the splendid achievement by Renée Fleming in putting together this remarkable multi-media hymn to nature. I may question the musical quality of certain of Ms Fleming’s choices in this work, but on the whole this combination of visuals and music was extremely successful. 

At intermission, Cal Performances Executive and Artistic Director Jeremy Geffen made a purposely vague announcement that due to a police incident in Lower Sproul Plaza, we were asked to remain in our seats until further notice. When a bit later we were allowed to go into the lobby during intermission, we were required not to go out into the sealed off Sproul Plaza, where, as I later learned, a man with a weapon had fired shots into the air during an argument with others. According to KPFA, no one was injured in this incident. None of this was experienced by our audience, and we were kept in the dark about what had happened. Nonetheless, the concert resumed after a slightly longer intermission than usual. 

The second half of the program featured Renée Fleming singing airs by Gabriel Fauré — Au bord de l’eau, a celebration of love, and Les berceuses, a wistful evocation of women’s loss when men seek adventure on far horizons, plus songs by Edward Grieg — the effervescent Lauf der Welt and the solemn Zur Rosenzeit. Next came Giacomo Puccini’s ever popular O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicci. which aria evoked the evening’s longest and most ardent applause. To close out the program, Renée Fleming sang Jerome Kern’s All the things you are followed by Andrew Lippa’s flashy The Diva. Together with her pianistic accompanist Howard Watkins, Renée Fleming performed one encore in which she invited the audience to sing along with the repeated chorus of hallelujah. All in all, this concert offered a welcome glimpse into the multi-faceted personality of Renée Fleming, one of our greatest contemporary musical artists,