ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — Soprano Renée Fleming will make her directing debut in Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” on the Aspen Pageant with three performances from July 21-26.
Whereas Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte set their opera about fiancee-swapping in 18th century Naples, Italy, Fleming is shifting the work to a recent setting, the corporate introduced Wednesday.
“It’s supposed to be royalty or aristocracy,” she mentioned. “I’m putting this more in high school, 1980, Yarmouth, Massachusetts, at the beginning of World Wide Wrestling. … Also, the early ’80s was Jane Fonda aerobics.”
Fleming, who turned 66 final week, continues to sing in recitals and in just a few modern operas however gave her final staged efficiency from the central repertoire in 2017.
Patrick Summers will conduct a scholar forged on the Wheeler Opera Home. Summers and Fleming have been co-artistic administrators of the Aspen Opera Theater and Vocal Arts Program since 2019.
“She is such a polymath,” Summers mentioned. “I’ve recognized only a few folks within the opera business as clever and as good as Renée Fleming.”
Fleming was to have directed “Cosi” for the Washington Nationwide Opera on the Kennedy Heart beginning Feb. 27, 2021, with Paulo Szot as Don Alfonso, however the manufacturing was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Fleming final week resigned as creative adviser at giant to the Kennedy Heart after Deborah Rutter was fired because the group’s president and President Donald Trump changed David Rubenstein as chairman.
The Aspen Pageant runs from July 2 to Aug. 24 and consists of the world premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’ “Siddhartha, She” on Aug. 2. The gender-swapping music drama primarily based on Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel “Siddhartha” has a libretto by Melissa Studdard and is carried out by Robert Spano, the competition’s music director since 2011.
