An Evening with Renée Fleming

Renée Fleming is one of the most highly acclaimed singers of our time, performing on the stages of the world’s great opera houses and concert halls. Honored with five Grammy awards and the U.S. National Medal of Arts, she has sung for momentous occasions from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to the Diamond Jubilee Concert for Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. In 2014 she brought her voice to a vast new audience when she became the first classical artist ever to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl. In 2023, she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for Arts and Health by the World Health Organization. She was also named as one of the 2023 recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Renée’s 2022/23 concert calendar included appearances in London, Vienna, Milan, Los Angeles and at Carnegie Hall. In November, she starred in the world premiere staging of The Hours, a new opera based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and award-winning film, at the Metropolitan Opera. In March, she portrayed Pat Nixon in a new production of Nixon in China at the Opéra de Paris. Renée stars in an upcoming series of IMAX films, Renée Fleming’s Cities That Sing, highlighting the music of great cultural capitals, with performances and visits to notable locations.

Renée has recorded everything from complete operas and song recitals to indie rock and jazz. In January, Decca released a special double-length album of live recordings from Renée’s iconic performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Renée Fleming: Greatest Moments at the Met. In February, Renée received the Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo for her album Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, with Yannick Nézet-Seguin as pianist. A collection of classical songs and specially commissioned world premieres, the album focuses on nature as both inspiration and victim of human activity. Known for bringing new audiences to classical music and opera, Renée has sung not only with Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli, but also with Elton John, Paul Simon, Sting, Josh Groban, and Joan Baez. Her voice is featured on the soundtracks of Best Picture Oscar winners The Shape of Water and The Lord of the Rings.

In recent years, Renée has become a leading advocate for research at the intersection of arts, health, and neuroscience. As Artistic Advisor to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, she launched the first ongoing collaboration between America’s national cultural center and the National Institutes of Health. She has presented her program Music and the Mind in more than 50 cities around the world, and launched Music and Mind LIVE, a weekly web show that amassed nearly 700,000 views, from 70 countries. She is a founding advisor for major initiatives in this field, including the Sound Health Network at the University of California San Francisco and the NeuroArts Blueprint at Johns Hopkins University.

In addition to being Advisor for Special Projects at LA Opera, Renée leads SongStudio at Carnegie Hall and is Co-Director of the Aspen Opera Center and VocalARTS at the Aspen Music Festival. Renée’s other awards include the 2023 Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, Germany’s Cross of the Order of Merit, and France’s Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.

Merle Dandridge most recently starred as Desiree Armfeldt in the critically acclaimed production of A Little Night Music at the Pasadena Playhouse. Most recently on screen, Merle reprised her role of Marlene, leader of the fireflies in HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us, based on Naughty Dog's video game of the same name. She can also currently be seen as Chief Ross in ABC’s Station 19 and as Zarina Killebrew in Apple TV+’s Truth Be Told. Merle starred as Grace Greenleaf in Oprah Winfrey’s hit series Greenleaf, which ran for five seasons. Other television includes HBO’s The Flight Attendant, FX’s Sons of Anarchy, CW’s Starcrossed and NBC’s The Night Shift. 

In the video game space, she is known for Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II as Marlene, the leader of Fireflies, Evelyn and the Nun in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Legion Commander and Winter Wyvern in Dota 2, Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2 and Katherine Collins in  Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, for which she won the 2016 BAFTA for “Best Performer.”

Born in Japan, raised in Nebraska, and schooled in Chicago at Roosevelt University, Dandridge began her acting career with leading roles on Broadway in Spamalot (Lady of the Lake), Rent (Joanne), Aida (Aida), Tarzan (Kala) and Jesus Christ Superstar. More recently, Merle took on the role of Pharaoh in the Manhattan Concert Productions’ presentation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at Lincoln Center. She is also the first woman to play the role of Papa Ge in the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of Once on This Island, which received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Musical Theater Album. She has toured the U.S. and Europe six times and has been featured in several regional theater productions (including multiple stints at the Geffen Playhouse and the Pasadena Playhouse). She has also performed at Tthe Hollywood Bowl, Boston Pops, and at Royal Albert Hall.

Merle serves on the board of directors of the Geffen Playhouse and Harvest Home, which provides housing and holistic support to homeless pregnant women.

Photo: Wes Klain

Simone Dinnerstein is an American pianist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and dog, less than a mile from the hospital in which she was born.

She has a distinctive musical voice. The Washington Post has called her “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.” She first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reflecting an aesthetic that was both deeply rooted in the score and profoundly idiosyncratic. She is, wrote The New York Times, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”

Since that recording, she has had a busy performing career. She has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Seoul Arts Center and the Sydney Opera House. She has made 13 albums, all of which topped the Billboard classical charts, with repertoire ranging from Couperin to Glass.

This season, Simone takes on a number of new artistic challenges. She gives the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she has conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord). In addition, she premieres Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos placed throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. She also joins Renée Fleming, the Emerson String Quartet, and Uma Thurman for performances of André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at both Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

From 2020 to 2022, Simone released a trilogy of albums recorded at her home in Brooklyn during the pandemic. A Character of Quiet (Orange Mountain Music, 2020), featuring the music of Philip Glass and Schubert, was described by NPR as “music that speaks to a sense of the world slowing down” and by The New Yorker as “a reminder that quiet can contain multitudes.” Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic (Supertrain Records, 2021) surpassed two million streams on Apple Music and was nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Instrumental Solo. The final installment in the trilogy, Undersong, was released in 2022 on Orange Mountain Music.

In recent years, Simone has created projects that express her broad musical interests. Following her recording of Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the United States for the very first time, raising the funding, booking the concerts, and organizing their housing and transport. Together, Simone and the orchestra played 11 concerts from Miami to Boston. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for Simone, co-commissioned by 12 American and Canadian orchestras. She collaborated with choreographer Pam Tanowitz to create New Work for Goldberg Variations, which was met with widespread critical acclaim. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals. Most recently, she created her own string ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs from the keyboard. Their performance of Bach’s cantata Ich Habe Genug in March 2020 was the last concert she gave before New York City shut down.

Simone is committed to giving concerts in non-traditional venues and to audiences who don’t often hear classical music. For the last three decades, she has played concerts throughout the United States for the Piatigorsky Foundation, an organization dedicated to the widespread dissemination of classical music. It was for the Piatigorsky Foundation that she gave the first piano recital in the Louisiana state prison system at the Avoyelles Correctional Center. She has also performed at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in a concert organized by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Simone founded Neighborhood Classics in 2009, a concert series open to the public and hosted by New York City Public Schools to raise funds for their music education programs. She also created a program called Bachpacking during which she takes a digital keyboard to elementary school classrooms, helping young children get close to the music she loves. She is a committed supporter and proud alumna of Philadelphia’s Astral Artists, which supports young performers.

Simone counts herself fortunate to have studied with three unique artists: Solomon Mikowsky, Maria Curcio and Peter Serkin, very different musicians who shared the belief that playing the piano is a means to something greater. The Washington Post comments that “ultimately, it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative.

Learn more at SimoneDinnerstein.com.

Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer – violins 
Lawrence Dutton – viola
Paul Watkins – cello

The Emerson String Quartet will have its final season of concerts in 2022/23, disbanding after more than four decades as one of the world’s premier chamber music ensembles. “With musicians like this,” wrote a reviewer for The Times (London), “there must be some hope for humanity.” The Quartet has made more than 30 acclaimed recordings, and has been honored with nine Grammys (including two for Best Classical Album), three Gramophone Awards, the Avery Fisher Prize, and Musical America’s “Ensemble of the Year” award. As part of their larger mission to keep the string quartet form alive and relevant, they have commissioned and premiered works from some of today’s most esteemed composers, and have partnered in performance with leading soloists such as Renée Fleming, Barbara Hannigan, Evgeny Kissin, Emanuel Ax, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Yefim Bronfman, James Galway, Edgar Meyer, Menahem Pressler, Leon Fleisher, André Previn, and Isaac Stern, to name a few.

In its final season, the Quartet will give farewell performances across North America and Europe, including San Francisco’s Herbst Theater, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, Vienna’s Musikverein, Prague’s Rudolfinum, London’s Southbank Centre for the completion of its acclaimed cycle of Shostakovich quartets, and more, before coming home to New York City for its final series there with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, in a trio of programs entitled Emerson Dimensions where the Quartet will perform some of its most storied repertoire. They will give several performances of André Previn’s Penelope with Renée Fleming, including at LA Opera, and they will appear at Carnegie Hall with Evgeny Kissin to perform the Dvořák Quintet as part of a benefit concert for the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. The final performance as the Emerson String Quartet will take place in October 2023 in New York City, and will be filmed for a planned documentary by filmmaker Tristan Cook.

The Quartet’s extensive discography includes the complete string quartets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bartók, Webern, and Shostakovich, as well as multi-CD sets of the major works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Dvořák. In its final season, the Quartet will record Schoenberg’s Second Quartet with Barbara Hannigan for release in 2023, with the sessions video documented by Mathieu Amalric for a short film. Deutsche Grammophon will also reissue its box set of the Emerson Complete Recordings on the label, with two new additions. In 2020, the group released a recording of Schumann’s three string quartets for the Pentatone label. In the preceding year, the Quartet joined forces with Grammy-winning pianist Evgeny Kissin to release a collaborative album for Deutsche Grammophon, recorded live at a sold-out Carnegie Hall concert in 2018.

Formed in 1976 and based in New York City, the Emerson String Quartet was one of the first quartets whose violinists alternate in the first violin position. The Quartet, which takes its name from the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, balances busy performing careers with a commitment to teaching, and serves as Quartet-in-Residence at Stony Brook University. In 2013, cellist Paul Watkins—a distinguished soloist, award-wining conductor, and devoted chamber musician—joined the original members of the Quartet to form today’s group.

In 2016, the State University of New York awarded full-time Stony Brook faculty members Philip Setzer and Lawrence Dutton the status of Distinguished Professor, and conferred the title of Honorary Distinguished Professor on part-time faculty members Eugene Drucker and Paul Watkins. The Quartet’s members also hold honorary doctorates from Middlebury College, the College of Wooster, Bard College, and the University of Hartford.  In 2015, the Quartet received the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award, Chamber Music America’s highest honor, in recognition of its significant and lasting contribution to the chamber music field.

Learn more at EmersonQuartet.com.

Composer, conductor, and pianist André Previn left his native Germany in 1938 to live in Paris and subsequently to settle in Los Angeles in 1940. His early career orchestrating film scores at MGM led quickly to conducting engagements of symphonic repertoire and on to an international career as music director of orchestras in London, Los Angeles, Oslo, and Pittsburgh. In the 1980s, he concentrated increasingly on composition for the concert hall and opera. His own richly lyrical style underscores his love of the late Romantic and early 20th-century masterpieces of which his interpretations as conductor are internationally renowned.

Previn’s first opera, A Streetcar Named Desire, which he set to a libretto based on Tennessee Williams’ play, had its premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 1998 with Renée Fleming in the role of Blanche DuBois. It continues to enjoy numerous performances worldwide. Previn’s 1998 recording of the work with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra won the Grand Prix du Disque. Houston Grand Opera premiered Previn’s second opera, Brief Encounter, in 2009.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, written for the London Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with playwright Tom Stoppard, remains popular everywhere. Music for Boston was premiered in 2012 at Tanglewood, and was commissioned to honor the festival’s 75th anniversary. Other highlights from his recent orchestral works include a Double Concerto for Violin and Violoncello written for Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson, premiered by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 2014, and performed since by orchestras across North America and Europe. Previn continued to expand his orchestral lyricism with Can Spring Be Far Behind? which premiered at Eastern Music Festival in 2016. 

Following the creation of several violin concertos and sonatas, Previn’s long-standing collaboration with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter continued with his Nonet for Two String Quartets and Contrabass, which premiered in 2015 as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Previn also wrote for Vladamir Ashkenazy, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Janet Baker, Sylvia McNair, Lynn Harrell and Barbara Bonney.

Throughout his seven-decade career, Previn performed with and composed for greats from classical, opera, jazz and standards including Anne-Sophie Mutter, Leontyne Price, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Oscar Peterson, Doris Day, and appeared on the Morecambe and Wise show. He conducted the world’s major orchestras both in concert and on recording, and frequently collaborated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Vienna Philharmonic. He held chief artistic positions with the London Symphony Orchestra, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2009, Previn was appointed principal guest conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra.

He won four Oscars (13 nominations); 10 Grammy Awards (44 nominations) and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award; was named honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II; and awarded the Austrian and German Cross of Merit, the Glenn Gould Prize, and the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award among countless additional accolades. In 1999, he was honored as Musical America’s Musician of the Year. His recordings have received several Grammy Awards, including for his own Sonata for Violin, "Vineyard” performed by Gil Shaham, and Violin Concerto "Anne-Sophie” featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 2010 he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award from The Recording Academy.

André Previn's concert music is published by G. Schirmer, Inc. and Chester Music Ltd. 

Tom Stoppard's first full-length play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, was staged by the National Theatre in 1967. Other award-winning work includes Jumpers, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, Rock 'N' Roll, The Hard Problem and Leopoldstadt. Stage adaptations and translations including Undiscovered Country (Schnitzler), On the Razzle (Nestroy), Rough Crossing (Molnar), The Seagull (Chekhov), Henry IV (Pirandello), Heroes (Sibleyras), Ivanov (Chekhov) and The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov).

His screenplays include Brazil, Empire of the Sun, Enigma and Shakespeare in Love (Academy Award) for Best Original Screenplay). He directed the 1990 film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for which he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. He received a knighthood in 1997 and in 2000 was awarded the Order of Merit.