Renée Fleming 'In Conversation' with music journalist and critic Edward Seckerson, as part of Ms Fleming's Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Opera Studies at the University of Oxford, November 2013.
Their discussion flowed from Seckerson's opening question: 'what makes now a different time to be a signer than in the past?'
Drawing on her professional experience and personal insights, Ms Fleming touched on issues ranging from increasingly large opera venues, to the challenges of the jet-setting travel that divas must now undertake, to the danger of stagnation in new repertoire. Realistic of the challenges opera will face in the future, Ms Fleming nonetheless conveyed great optimism. For her, as opera becomes increasingly theatrical the possibilities for growth presented by genres like musical theatre increases. On the other hand, new and young audiences, especially in China, with an insatiable appetite for western opera are giving whole new life to the traditional repertoires.
-strategicdialogue.org/humanitas
-www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programme...
-www.torch.ox.ac.uk/humanitas
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Humanitas is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge designed to bring leading academics, practitioners and scholars to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and co-ordinated in Cambridge by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and in Oxford by the Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH).