LIVE: Sunday, August 16, at 1:30PM EDT
The dynamic husband-and-wife duo of tenor Roberto Alagna and soprano Aleksandra Kurzak give a concert of popular arias and duets, accompanied by a string quintet, from an outdoor terrace in Èze, France, with a spectacular view of the Mediterranean. From the rhapsodic love duet from Madama Butterfly to the hilarious hijinks of L’Elisir d’Amore to surprising selections such as the moving Mexican song “Cielito lindo,” the program promises to be full of joy and favorite melodies—all delivered “with video as good as a movie theater ... [and] sound probably better” (Washington Post).
Tickets for this live concert are $20, and the performance will remain available for on-demand viewing for 12 days. If you are unable to tune in live, you may purchase a ticket at any point during the 12-day window to access the concert on demand.
McLEAN, Va. — Tim Jessell, a lanky divorced Washington corporate
attorney and father of three, had given up on love in 2008 when he was set up
on a blind date with a beautiful blond New Yorker who had also given up on
love.
They clicked, and many years later began that old sitcom debate
about splitting drawers and closets. If she sold her Upper West Side apartment
and moved to D.C., would he be able to make enough space in his townhouse?
“She told me she was bringing her piano,” Mr.
Jessell said, with a smile. “That was serious.” And, of course, the designer
gowns were going to overrun the closets.
Mr. Jessell, a sports fan and Bruce
Springsteen fanatic who knew nothing about opera before that first date, ended
up in a new place, an airy glass and stone contemporary house beside a creek in
McLean, Va., with a hammock and the most famous American soprano since Beverly
Sills.
Curled on a white couch in their living room,
wearing a silky cream blouse, black pinstriped pants and turquoise jewelry,
Renée Fleming said that she was glad Mr. Jessell had never heard of her.
“If they’re not a fan, it gives you a chance to kind of develop
something based on who you are,” she said, noting wryly that their love bloomed
even though the first performance of hers Mr. Jessell saw was “Lucrezia
Borgia.”
“That’s an opera in which I fall in love with my own son and then
kill all his friends and him by mistake,” she said. “He embraced the whole
thing.”
Moreover, Mr. Jessell was consistently willing to get on a plane to
wherever she was. Ms. Fleming had seen plenty of glimmers with men evaporate
over her grueling travel schedule. “Someone would introduce me to someone and
we’d go out and I’d say ‘Oh, I had so much fun tonight, I’ll be back in three
weeks,’” she said. “I could sort of see their eyes glaze over.”
After her divorce from the actor Rick Ross,
when she was raising their two daughters, “I was single for a long time,” Ms.
Fleming said. “And there was a period in which I just felt really angry about
the fact that it’s hard for accomplished, gifted women to be with men of
similar talents.”
‘The All-American Diva’
Now Ms. Fleming, her Steinway and her gowns
are happily ensconced in their new house, where she is rehearsing a solo
program that includes Handel, “Over the Rainbow” and much more for a
Metropolitan Opera concert at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown, livestreaming
Saturday at 1 p.m. Her audience, the smallest she has ever performed for, will
be four cameras, two of them robotic.
The pay-per-view event is designed to help the
Met survive during a pandemic that is strangling her profession. The virus can
be easily spread by singing and through crowds, which makes opera — which was
already struggling — exceedingly vulnerable.
The shimmery, creamy voice of the “undiva,” as
she is known, is ingrained in America’s cultural memory, at both sad and happy
moments. She sang “Amazing Grace” at a memorial service at ground zero after
9/11 and “Danny Boy” at John McCain’s funeral at the Washington National Cathedral.
She sang in Sindarin, the Elvish language for “The Lord of the Rings”
soundtrack. She sang a Top 10 list on David Letterman’s show, Verdi with the
Muppets, and a goose-bumps-inducing rendition of the national anthem at the
2014 Super Bowl.............
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/style/maureen-dowd-renee-fleming.html?utm_source=720FlemingPPVToday&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2021_ppv&utm_content=version_A
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