Fleming Shares Tender Schneider Work

Fleming Shares Tender Schneider Work

LAURA E. SMITH

Vice President for Marketing and Communications

On Friday, July 16, soprano Renée Fleming graces the stage at the Aspen Music Festival and School’s Benedict Music Tent with the Aspen Chamber Symphony, sharing the tender song cycle Winter Morning Walks by acclaimed jazz orchestra leader and composer Maria Schneider.

It is a work Fleming deeply loves and has found audiences respond to enthusiastically. “Sometimes you just fall in love with pieces. There are works that I remember where I was when I first heard them and that is true for [Schneider’s] recording, which won three Grammys when it came out. I just so fell in love with it,” she says.

Fleming asked Schneider, who is a longtime personal friend, to write a version she could perform with piano. It is this version she performed just weeks ago in Costa Mesa with pianist Inon Barnatan. “It got a standing ovation,” she notes. “It was just five of the songs, but it resonated with people so much. Her music is beautiful, it’s evocative. She is incredibly fastidious, a perfectionist about every pitch.”

Schneider released Winter Morning Walks as a studio recording in 2013, drawing inspiration from the poetry of Ted Kooser and his 2001 collection of 100 poems of the same name. Kooser won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2005, and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006.

Schneider, who will attend the Aspen concert, has commented that she also fell in love with Kooser’s poetry. She has said: “His poetry is so expressive, it captures humanity and just the simple things about people. It makes you almost feel like crying.” The poems speak of the quieter aspects of nature— the birds, the moon, the glowing eyes of nighttime creatures.

Says Fleming of another element shared by her, Schneider, and Kooser, “Maria and I share this incredible passion for the natural world. She’s an avid birder and has taken me birding in Central Park on many occasions.”

Schneider is a creative force acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. She frequently writes for her 18-member jazz collective, tours as a jazz band leader, and is a highly successful recording artist. Her latest double-album, Data Lords (2020), was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of two Grammy Awards, named Jazz Album of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association and NPR, and won France’s prestigious Grand Prix de l’Académie du Jazz.

“I just love her musical artistic director of the AOTVA language,” Fleming says. It program, Renée Fleming. will be the first time she has sung the version with chamber orchestra. “It’s hard to program,” she comments, “because it needs a jazz trio in addition to the orchestra.”

But from a master who knows the full span of music for soprano, she says this piece is worth it. “It really speaks to me,” she says.

Also on the program is Michael Abels’s Delights and Dances and Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn. AMFS Music Director Robert Spano conducts the Aspen Chamber Symphony.

Soprano, AMFS alumna, and co-artistic director of the AOTVA program, Renée Fleming

Grammy-winning composer and jazz orchestra leader, Maria Schneider

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