Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Renée Fleming

Excellent vocal acting from Thomas Hampson, Renée Fleming, Xiaomeng Zhang and a magnificent orchestral performance conducted by Kent Nagano can't make Valentina Carrasco's production fully grip.

Fleming's program, an outgrowth of her Grammy-winning album Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, makes an urgent case for the preservation of the world's natural wonders.

Kevin Puts' song cycle inspired by the correspondence of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz makes its long-awaited New York debut, featuring Renée Fleming and Rod Gilfry. 

Debutant conductor Thomas Guggeis filled out the programme with a creation of his own – a fusion of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and Meistersinger.

Based on letters between Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, Kevin Puts’ The Brightness of Light at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City portrays marriage as a collaborative work in progress. 

Renée Fleming makes a worthy return to the Marschallin, but this all-Strauss program, led by Andris Nelsons, is more notable for its deficits.

In one of their final performances, the Emerson String Quartet comes to Cleveland to present André Previn’s Penelope, featuring Renée Fleming and other special guests.

Le chef-d'œuvre de John Adams fait son entrée à Bastille par la grande porte, avec une mise en scène inspirée de Valentina Carrasco, une distribution exemplaire et une excellente direction musicale.

The French pianist steps in to join the American diva in the Musikverein for a program of French and German art song. 

Is it possible to have a minor success on every level? Kevin Puts' The Hours underwhelms in its world premiere production at the Metropolitan Opera. 

The operatic focus was on Otello and Capriccio, but Enrique Mazzola held back the LPO's star turn with Dvořák’s overture as a thrilling opener. 

Despite beautifully realized performances from Renée Fleming and Kelli O'Hara, Kevin Puts' opera is still finding its voice.

The soprano is lifted to lyrical heights by the Filarmonia della Scala and Andrés Orozco-Estrada at the open air Wolkenturm on the final night of the festival. 

The American diva dazzles with plenty of star power, but shows she still has a remarkable power to communicate.

“I missed dress applause!” Renée Fleming returns to live performance in style with a recital alongside pianist Inon Barnatan. 

Kevin Puts’ expanded work on Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz provides another triumph for Renée Fleming and the NSO, while two Strauss works demonstrate both its artistic re-emergence and work left to do.

The HK Phil display virtuosic brilliance in an energetic rendition of Shostakovich’s witty Symphony no. 9 under Jaap van Zweden

Renée Fleming assumes the role of the Countess is Capriccio as part of an all-Strauss program at Symphony Hall. 

In a highly versatile recital, soprano Renée Fleming was at her best in unaffected songs and operetta.

An evening of Schubert in Washington DC, ending with Luciano Berio's "restoration" job, Rendering. 

An eclectic programme from this Swedish orchestra which gave sharply defined performances in repertoire that, at first glance, had seemingly little in common.

Renée Fleming sings Barber and Strauss at the Concertgebouw.

Renée Fleming swoons in Strauss' Four Last Songs, while having Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden are our guides in the Alpine Symphony. 

La dirección de Thielemann fue una prolongación del texto, que crepitaba en la memoria, y su cuerpo de principio a fin, sencillamente, se fundió con la música.

There are several things wrong with the new Robert Carsen directed Der Rosenkavalier that just opened at the Met, but the singing is not among them.

Renée Fleming has decided the time is right to bow out gracefully from the operatic stage, choosing her signature role to bid the fondest of farewells to London.

It would be no exaggeration to say Franz Hawlata stole the show, an act of grand larceny made all the more remarkable by the strong cast which shared the stage.

Renée Fleming joins the Pacific Symphony for Strauss, Italian Songs and Rodgers and Hammerstein. 

Affable host Richard Gere united a starry musical cast to celebrate Carnegie Hall’s 125th Anniversary Gala.

First the beauty, then the words at a Renée Fleming Carnegie Hall Song Recital.

Two landmark scores from the repertory of the Ballets Russes sandwiched Thursday night’s concert at Symphony Hall: Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky’s Petrushka (in its original 1913 version).

Love, light, levity, life. A joyful performance of Franz Lehár's Parisian operetta offers catharsis in troubling times. 

The superstar diva, Renee Fleming, offers an eclectic program of opera, Lieder and show-tunes in Sydney, and particularly impressed with exquisite vocal nuances in works by Ravel, Canteloube and Richard Strauss.

Only the slightest of quibbles with a fun, frothy new production of The Merry Widow at The Met. 

Late in the opera, in the calm that settles after a vaudeville of ballet dancers and Italian singers, Fleming’s poise pervades the Countess’s closing rumination over love and the nature of art. It’s a concert piece nestled in Capriccio’s narrative bustle, and to hear Fleming sing it is to be reminded of her talents as a communicator in music within and beyond the opera stage.

The New York Philharmonic’s opening concert was an absolute hit, and a promising start to a strong season, with special guests Josh Groban, Renée Fleming and Joshua Bell in La Dolce Vita: Music of the Italian Cinema.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin kept the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra sounding especially lively and cohesive in this revival of Otto Schenk's enchanting production of Rusalka, starring Renée Fleming as the water nymph and Piotr Beczala as her lover.

Vienna is a nostalgic town, and in few places is the past clung onto more tightly than at the State Opera, where a Tosca created for Renata Tebaldi has been pressed creakingly into service for over 55 years now.

For the last concert of her Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, Renée Fleming assembled one of the least coherent concept programmes imaginable. Billed as “Vienna: Window to Modernity”, it was never clear what was specifically Viennese about the music on show, nor what was particularly modern, nor what windows had to do with anything.

One would think that either Renée Fleming or Susan Graham alone would be reason enough to sell out a large venue such as Disney Hall. But everything is bigger in Hollywood, and the LA Phil brought both artists together for a one-night recital of French art song. But even that wasn’t enough.

The devil, they say, has all the best lines. In yesterday's performance of Verdi's Otello at the Met, the villain was simply sensational. Falk Struckmann's delivery of Jago's Credo in un Dio crudel (“I believe in a cruel God”) was a masterpiece of nihilism, combining power and richness of voice with a tone of pure, matter of fact evil.

Read our review of Renée Fleming's production of Verdi­'s Otello in its 2012 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Otto Schenk's production of Der Rosenkavalier is now four decades old but it still looks quite fresh, its opulence unfaded.

Read our review of Stephen Wadsworth's production of Rodelinda by Handel, in its 2011 HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Handel, two cracking counter-tenors and Renée Fleming were all the excuses needed for a long-overdue trip to New York to hear Stephen Wadsworth's production of Rodelinda - the very piece which revived interest in Handel's opera following its performance in Göttingen in the 1920s.

Otello, Verdi’s penultimate opera, is a tightly-wound setting of Shakespeare’s familiar tragedy. From the opening storm to the title character dying upon a kiss, it is more fragmentary and emotionally cool than his earlier work, an opera that tends to be more admired than loved.

Read our review of John Cox's production of Strauss­' Capriccio in its 2011 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Read our review of Nathaniel Merrill's production of Der Rosenkavalier by Strauss, in its 2010 HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Read our review of Mary Zimmerman's production of Rossini­'s Armida in its 2010 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.