ONE NIGHT ONLY: Renée Fleming’s appearance with the Princeton Symphony Orchestra on June 7 is a cornerstone of the 2025 Princeton Festival. Her concert is bracketed by “Voices that Changed Music.” (Photo by Andrew Eccles Decca)
By Nancy Plum
“Throughout history, music and the arts have given us social cohesion — it’s what enabled us to cooperate with each other and stay together.” This commentary from singer Renée Fleming has long set the tone for Fleming’s stellar multi-decade career, leading to five Grammy awards, a National Medal of Arts, recognition by the Kennedy Center Honors, and countless accolades worldwide. Fleming will join Princeton Symphony Orchestra on June 7 at 8 p.m. as part of the 2025 Princeton Festival, presenting “well-known gems, a few obscure discoveries and more intimate fare.” One of the most acclaimed singers of our time, Fleming is a “quintuple threat” — with international success in opera, concert stage, recording, musical theater and as an author and advocate for performance, music education and embedding the arts into health care. Her artistry has been hailed as the “gold standard of soprano sound.”
Heading into its fourth year at Morven Museum & Garden, Princeton Festival has chosen to present this very high-profile artist to build on the success of opening last year with Metropolitan Opera soprano Angel Blue and bring further attention to the wide range of Festival offerings. Princeton Symphony Music Director Rossen Milanov had collaborated with Fleming in the past, and she was eager to come to Princeton to perform in the Festival’s unique space at Morven’s Pavilion. For this year’s Festival, the seating at the Pavilion has been expanded to accommodate a much larger audience.
To opera lovers, Renée Fleming needs no introduction. Born in Indiana, Pa., to music teacher parents, Fleming seemed destined for a calling to the stage. She studied with leading teachers at a number of prestigious institutions, including the Crane and Eastman schools of music and The Juilliard School. Fleming made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Countess Almaviva in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s La nozze de Figaro, launching a career with the Met spanning more than three decades.
In recent years, Fleming has combined performing with a study of the relationship between music and health, including the incorporation of music into neuroscience research. Collaborating with music therapists and experts in the fields of neuroscience of music and biomedical study, Fleming maintains that music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other activity. In her former capacity as artistic advisor to Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Fleming launched a partnership between the Center and the National Institutes of Health, later editing the essay anthology Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, published in 2024.
Throughout her career, Fleming has upheld a commitment to the next generation of performers, acknowledging that the professional arena is now vastly different from her early years. Describing success as a combination of “natural talent, hard work, tenacity, resiliency, and luck,” Fleming advises up-and-coming artists that “with the changed media landscape, in many ways the path for young singers today is more difficult than it was for me. Singers now need to be as versatile as possible. But some advice I was given remains the same: fine-tune your skills to the best of your ability (including command of languages, acting and expressive skills, performance practice and style), and don’t accept technical limitations.”
Fleming views constructing a recital program as similar to planning a menu, taking great care to enable everyone in the audience, regardless of their individual taste or musical background, to hear something to respond to and enjoy. Her concert in Princeton reflects connections to the local community; in addition to friendships with University and Institute for Advanced Study individuals, Fleming recently premiered Princeton composer Alan Fletcher’s setting of Three American Songs, which she will be performing at the Festival. Recognizing university towns as centers of learning and research as well as vibrant arts scenes, Fleming also admires that “a wonderful city like Princeton supports a fantastic symphony orchestra, accomplished choirs, and a thriving theater.”
Fleming’s appearance with Princeton Symphony Orchestra is a cornerstone of the 2025 Princeton Festival. Her one-night-only concert is bracketed by “Voices that Changed Music,” featuring songs ranging from Elvis Presley to Gladys Knight to Prince, and “Sondheim in the City” with cabaret singer Melissa Errico. A three-performance run of Giacomo Puccini’s blockbuster opera Tosca anchors a week of dance, “Baroque Brilliance,” Motown, and the music of the 1970s Swedish band sensation ABBA. Community activities include “Yoga in the Garden;” a Community Day of music, art and food; and a Festival Farmers Market.
Fleming’s repertoire for the evening, ranging from Handel to Rodgers and Hammerstein, will no doubt set a high bar for the Festival’s diverse series of events. Princeton Symphony promises that this year’s summer showcase will have something for everyone; as Fleming remarked in a recent interview, “there’s nothing that brings our emotions out more than a musical experience.”
The Princeton Festival takes place June 6-21 and includes musical performances ranging from classical to musical theater and the popular ABBA show band ARRIVAL, as well as other varied artistic offerings. Ticket information for all Festival activities can be found princetonsymphony.org/festival/events/2025-princeton-festival.