New job for Renee Fleming
OperaThe singer, 65, has been named Festival Director of the 2025 Cincinnati May Festival.
‘I’m honored,’ she says. ‘Beyond music’s power to express the most profound ideas and feelings, we are learning more every day about its enormous potential to improve our health and well-being. The Festival is programmed with those goals in mind.’
For those unfamiliar, Cincinnati May Festival began in the 1870s when the city was known for its large population of German immigrants or descendants and their community sing-alongs. It has always featured works with a substantial choral component, using a high-quality community chorus and, after those early years, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (founded 1895). The main events are concentrated on two weekends in May, but several other Festival-connected performances (or regular CSO concerts using the May Festival Chorus) take place through the year.
Its past music directors have included Theodore Thomas, Eugene Ysaye, Eugene Goossens, Josef Krips, Max Rudolf, James Levine, and–from 1979 to 2016–James Conlon, all of these supplemented by visiting guest conductors. It has usually described itself as the oldest continuing choral Festival in the Western Hemisphere.
The 2025 Festival repertoire:
https://mayfestival.com/concerts-and-events/season-at-a-glance/
And the “Victorian Gothic”-style Cincinnati Music Hall, which received its most recent renovation about seven years ago:
https://otj.com/projects/cincinnati-music-hall/
When the Cincinnati Symphony was re-formed in 1909 with Stokowski as its new conductor he found the orchestra rehearsed entirely in German.
‘It has usually described itself as the oldest continuing choral Festival in the Western Hemisphere.’
England’s Three Choirs Festival was first held in 1715. Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester are all west of the Greenwich meridian, so they are in the Western Hemisphere.
You must be fun to sit next to at dinner.
What’s so wrong about pointing about factual inaccuracy? Do you hold the Trumpian view of truth – that anything with which you disagree can not be true?
Unless my maths is wildly out of kilter, something which began in 1715 is older than something which began 155 years later.
Did you get a maths degree from Trump University
I think you know quite well what a 150-year-old music festival in Ohio, USA, on the other side of an ocean from almost the entirety of Europe, meant by referring to itself as the oldest continuous choral festival “in the western hemisphere,” without regard to Worcester.
But since you seem to lean toward the pedantic, to focus on the letter of the word instead of its meaning, I’d suggest you write to Cincinnati May Festival itself and urge that it immediately begin describing limit as the oldest continuous choral festival “in the Americas,” so that it won’t offend dear Hereford.
While you’re at it, please be sure to remind the choirs at Cambridge and Ely and Norwich, and the Britten people in Suffolk, and the Royal Family (when at Sandringham) that they’re east of that meridian and therefore part of the same “hemisphere” as Mongolia. I’m sure they’ll be quite gratified.
Why?
Because Ms. Fleming can’t let go of her career and lesser venues will hire her. How about simply “Principal Guest Artist”?
The May Festival should deep six the ersatz publicity photo of Renee as Adele Bloch-Bauer (The Woman in Gold). Even for her, it is a bit much.
What about you? What pitiful career can’t you let go of? Probably of a frustrated music critic wannabe maybe? What do you know of excellency in Opera? And of Ms. Flemming’s achievements? Do yourself a favor and to the world: Shut up!!!
That “Miss Fleming can’t let go of her career” is both ridiculous and demeaning of a great artist. I suppose the wonderful Gundula Janowitz also couldn’t let go of her career when she became director of the Graz Opera on her retirement from singing, or the (recent) octogenarian Sir Thomas Allen should have just faded away instead of becoming a noted stage director, or the much younger Vesselina Karasova should have ceased all actities as a glorious singer rather than becoming Artistic Director of the Stara Zagora State Opera. The list goes on.