GRACE LIU ANDERSON
Renée Fleming performed with New Jersey Symphony, conducted by Xian Zhang, Oct. 6 at NJPAC in Newark.
New Jersey Symphony opened its 102nd season with superstar soprano Renée Fleming in a celebratory event that put sentiment over sentimentality. The concert, titled “Voice of Nature: the Anthropocene,” explored the majesty, peril and fragility of the natural world through both its music, and immersive films by The National Geographic Society.
With Xian Zhang conducting, Fleming modeled the program — which took place at NJPAC in Newark, Oct. 6 — after her 2021 album of the same name, exploring complexities of the human relationship to nature through wide-ranging classical, romantic and contemporary repertoire.
In the Symphony’s longstanding tradition, the season-opening concert began with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Coincidentally, this anthem was Fleming’s first collaboration with the symphony back in 2014, when she sang it to a recording made by the Symphony for a Super Bowl performance at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford.
GRACE LIU ANDERSON
Renée Fleming and Xian Zhang at NJPAC.
Though the concert, like the album (a collaboration with Yannick Nézet-Séguin), touched on thorny subjects including the ecological crisis, Fleming has mastered a stylish blend of tender sentiment and extrovertive high spirits. She was polished and poised, displaying no shortage of star wattage with her trademark velvety voice, easy charm, humorous rapport — and, of course, her off-the-shoulder gowns and “Renée” coiffure. She sang in the songs’ original languages, with English supertitles when necessary.
Zhang was a stylish and flowing accompanist throughout, and a sensitive interpreter of the program’s delicate themes, leading the orchestra with markings that were more cantabile than vivace to bring out the songs’ sweetness. In an ethereal, lyrical “Pretty Bird” by Hazel Dickens (arr. Jeremy Kittel), she sustained a barely-there veil of pianissimo below Fleming’s soulful vocals.
A large video screen hung over the orchestra and showed drone footage, underwater shots and time lapse videos that took audiences from the seas to the stars. “At a dinner party I met someone who introduced me to the CEO of National Geographic,” Fleming told the audience. “And he said, ‘Yeah, we’ll make your films,’ so here we are with a wonderful message to take around the world because this planet is definitely worth sustaining!”
Imagery progressed from oceans and skies to land and vegetation, and creatures great and small. By the time the first half wrapped with Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love” (with a jaunty, drum-based percussion solo from James Musto), videos had included a lioness grooming her cubs, Beluga whales swimming in a familial pack, and a mother elephant feeding her calf.
Of course, there were threatening themes of mass destruction in the “Anthropocene” concert, whose title refers to the term geologists use to describe the epoch in which humans started having a noticeable impact on the environment. “I realized that the crisis we had been warned of for so long had arrived,” Fleming wrote in the program notes.
At the darker end sat Nico Muhly’s “Endless Space.” Lyrics — informed by the poetry of the 17th-century English theologian Thomas Traherne and writings by the climate change journalist Robinson Meyer — predicted that “the world will become newly hostile” in the coming centuries through weather extremes and plagues. The song was accompanied by drone shots of storm surges, which felt a bit on the nose in the aftermath of Helene’s destruction from Florida to the Appalachian Mountains.
The denouement, Kevin Puts’ “Evening,” implicated mankind through drone shots of forestry and construction equipment in the midst of smoking ruins. Despite the melancholy mood of the text (“We know we are doomed, done for, damned …”), from a poem by Dorianne Laux, the vocals sat perfectly in Fleming’s richer lower registers and radiant highs. A contemplative piano solo raised a glimmer of hope; it was not all gloom and doom.
Between the Puts-Muhly specters there were balmy climes and flowers in Joseph Canteloube’s “Baïléro” from “Chants d’Auvergne”; the majesty of rainforests in Heitor Villa-Lobos’ “Finale” (arr. Abel Rocha) from “Floresta do Amazonas”; and lush flora and fauna in Björk’s (arr. Hans Ek) “All Is Full of Love.”
Highlights also included an otherworldly, mystical pastiche of aurora borealis and celestial cosmos for Howard Shore’s “Twilight and Shadow” (from the “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” soundtrack), sung by Fleming with stately poise; and an art song-oriented “Our Finch Feeder” from “Winter Morning Walks” by Maria Schneider, with emphatic marcato from the double bass against a montage of birds.
While the first half of the concert showed both the vagaries and glories of mankind and Mother Nature, the second half seemed to say that we are not powerless in the face of the looming global threat and that the climate emergency can be turned around before it is too late.
Iconic photos from the American experience, set to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” reminded us of the rewards of collective action, including the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, the Apollo astronauts landing on the moon, and marches led by The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The last image was of firemen atop the World Trade Center rubble.
A more subtle approach came in “A Letter from Sullivan Ballou,” in which composer John Kander set a letter — written in 1861 from a soldier to his wife shortly before he was killed in battle — to haunting melodies. Fleming sang poignantly, capturing the piece’s drama and emotion against a backdrop of Civil War-era families in historical photographs.
A handful of operatic chestnuts sparked the most applause: “Musetta svaria sulla bocca viva” from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “La Bohème”; and the beloved “O mio babbino caro” from Giacomo Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi,” sung against videos of Italy’s touristic landmarks.
GRACE LIU ANDERSON
Renée Fleming performs with New Jersey Symphony at NJPAC.
At age 65, Fleming still sings full time, though no longer in the title roles she made famous during her prima donna days, including Rodelinda, Thaïs, Rusalka, Manon and Arabella. Her voice is as flexible as ever, and she sailed through effortless, delicate ornaments and silken tones in “Care Selve” from Handel’s “Atalanta.”
Zhang avoided the maudlin excesses that the wistfully nostalgic Italian works — including a dolce and gentle-toned “Love Theme” from Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to “Cinema Paradiso” — can inspire.
Near the end of the concert’s first half, credits flashed over Curtis Green’s “Red Mountains Sometimes Cry,” showing the exotic, far-flung locales where the video footage was taken, including Cook Islands, Botswana, Seychelles and Colombia. Whether the program intended to inspire a sense of journey wasn’t clear, but both Fleming and the audience seemed to have had a fine time. The concert wrapped with a lighthearted encore, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” from “My Fair Lady.”
The Symphony’s season-opening celebrations included a pre-concert brunch and a benefit auction to support its education and community engagement programs. Craig Silliman, interim president and CEO (and Board co-chair), credited Zhang, in her ninth season, for taking the symphony to new heights.
Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean was on hand to honor the occasion. In remarks before the show, he took attendees back to 1986 when, as governor, he proposed the idea of building NJPAC as New Jersey’s flagship performing arts center. (It opened in 1997.) He said he had always dreamed of building a space in the largest city in New Jersey that would rival any arts facility of its kind in the country, and invite great orchestras like New Jersey Symphony to perform with some of the greatest artists in the world.
“That was a dream that I thought was a simple dream, and it came true,” he said. “As the artistic center grew, the city grew around it … I came here today to simply say that very few things are as wonderful in life as having a dream and seeing it come true.”
His comments set a fond and reverential tone for the orchestra, which is entering a new period of growth and transition that will continue through the next four years with the creation of a new headquarters in Jersey City slated to open Spring 2026; the search for a new president and CEO following Gabriel van Aalst’s recent resignation; and the replacement of Zhang (who accepted the position of music director of Seattle Symphony beginning in the 2025-26 season) after her contract extension ends in 2028.
The cover of the album “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,” by Renée Fleming and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Fleming is also in a new chapter, switching from the larger-than-life diva roles that defined her luminous career into advocacy and ambassadorships. (The Symphony’s opening weekend festivities included a panel discussion with Fleming and local health experts on Oct. 4 at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine in Nutley to discuss “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness,” an anthology she edited.)
Artists such as Fleming have the unique ability to open dialogues on such defining issues, and she is using her Grammy-winning Anthropocene album — inspired by the comforts she found while hiking around her Virginia home during COVID lockdowns — to raise awareness. She has toured with this concert since the beginning of this year and will continue into 2025.
“This project was actually something that I put together during the pandemic because being outside in nature was the thing that made me feel well,” she said between songs.
Fleming and Zhang, who first performed together in 2017 with the China NCPA Orchestra in Beijing, are united in this vision. At a press event in March to announce the 2024-25 season, Zhang said she had wanted to create a nature-themed season since the pandemic began in 2020. “When that happened,” she said, “I was trying to figure out a way to come back to nature because we find more comfort in that.”
For information on upcoming Symphony concerts, visit njsymphony.org. For more on Fleming, visit reneefleming.com.
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