Renée Fleming sings the European premiere of Kevin Puts’s The Brightness of Light, his setting of the O’Keeffe and Stieglitz letters, with the London Philharmonic.
Renée Fleming, the soprano, sings the European premiere of Kevin Puts’s The Brightness of Light at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank on Wednesday 10 March 2027. The London Philharmonic Orchestra plays under Tianyi Lu, and Lucas Meachem sings Stieglitz.
Fleming was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in 1959. The Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier became her signature role, which she sang in Houston, Munich, Covent Garden and at the Met.
She has won five Grammy Awards, holds the National Medal of Arts and received the Kennedy Center Honors in December 2023. She remains the only classical singer to have sung the national anthem at the Super Bowl.
Puts, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has written for her more than once. The Brightness of Light, which she premiered in 2019, sets the letters between the painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz for soprano and baritone.
In June 2012 she sang from the balcony of Buckingham Palace at the Diamond Jubilee Concert. The cycle is sung in English, with surtitles and projected images.
Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, From the New World, written in America in 1893, takes the second half.