Renee Fleming

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2005

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the soprano Renée Fleming. Renée Fleming is one of the greatest sopranos on the world's stages today. She has won critical acclaim for her interpretations of Mozart and Strauss and has made a series of operatic roles her own - including the Countess in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Dvorak's ill-fated water-nymph Rusalka. However, she says her route into classical music was far from straightforward. She grew up in upstate New York, the daughter of two music teachers. Although the family used to sing together, Renée says she was not a natural performer and was very anxious about appearing in public and then, while at college, her musical love was jazz rather than opera.

Her musical break-through came at the age of 29, when she was asked to stand in as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro at the last minute. Since then she's appeared in all the great opera houses. As well as the standard repertoire, she is a champion of new music and Andre Previn is one of many who have written especially for her. She has won numerous accolades for her singing including two Grammies and two Classical Brit awards.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: River by Renée Fleming Book: The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis Luxury: Coffee

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My causeway this week is a singer, she's seen and heard most often in opera but her versatility and
0:35.2	range mean that she's also in demand for many other roles as well. Hers is the
0:39.4	haunting voice of Elvish in Lord of the Rings and earlier this year she released a
0:43.4	CD of jazz and rock classics. The daughter of music teachers in upstate New York
0:48.3	she went to the Juilliard School of Music and then studied in Germany where she
0:51.8	went to master classes given by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf.
0:55.0	Despite her obvious talent, she found the business of singing extremely hard
0:59.5	and sometimes despaired of ever making a success of it. Then she was asked to step in at
1:04.3	short notice to sing the part of the Countess in the Marriage of Figaro at
1:07.7	Houston Grand Opera. That she now thinks launched her career, a career that sees her today at the top of her profession,
1:15.2	a familiar presence in the world's great opera houses and the current incarnation of the
1:19.6	great American soprano capitals G A and S.
1:23.2	Self criticism is where I live, she says.
1:26.0	I can't imagine that I would ever be complacent.
1:29.0	She is Renee Fleming.
1:30.9	So it was quite a long time coming for you, Renee. You were 29 when you
1:35.2	suddenly got that big break. You went really from nothing to being the lead role, the
1:40.2	countess, one of the most difficult and demanding rules in the repertoire.
1:44.1	It's true, but the thing is it takes one impresario to take a chance and say, I think this
1:50.6	girl has talent, I'm going to give her an opportunity and I was literally thrown
	...

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