Raised in 'an eclectic soup of music,' Renee Fleming adds star power to Cincy May Festival

“Above all, I love singing,” Renée Fleming said.

No surprise there. For 35 years, Fleming has wowed audiences in opera houses around the world, performing works by Mozart and Bellini and Richard Strauss and so many others.

But unlike most of her contemporaries, she has never been content to limit herself to the operatic repertoire.

“Because my parents were both music educators, I grew up in an eclectic soup of music,” Fleming said. Raised in tiny Churchville, New York, a town of 1,000 about 15 miles west of Rochester, she was “late to talk and early to sing,” her mother told a reporter in 2023.

She quickly became a staple of school plays. In seventh grade, she was cast as the Mother Abbess in a school production of “The Sound of Music.” It turns out that she was the only one in her class who had the vocal chops to sing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”

“I was really fortunate to be in a school district where music and other arts were valued,” Fleming said. “Without that spark, it’s difficult to imagine what direction my life might have taken.”

Her career has been as illustrious as it has been varied. Within a month of starting college at the State University of New York, Potsdam, she was cast as the soprano soloist in Bach’s B-minor Mass. Soon after, she was performing with a jazz trio. That passion for musical diversity has never waned, as she has performed on Broadway, recorded songs for “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” received a National Medal of Arts, collaborated with the Second City comedy troupe and performed with everyone from Luciano Pavarotti and Lou Reed to Paul Simon and John Prine. She even sang the national anthem at Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014.

It has been a remarkable career.

Now she is the festival director of Cincinnati’s 2025 May Festival, which runs through May 24 at Music Hall. A few years back, the May Festival changed its artistic leadership model. Rather than have a music director serving an open-ended tenure – James Conlon led the Festival for 37 years – they now appoint a different festival director each year. The idea was that each successive leader would infuse the festival with a new artistic energy.

“Something like this – the May Festival – is tailor-made for me,” Fleming said. “I’ve had creative advisor roles in Kansas City and Chicago, so I understand administration. And musically, the opportunity to present such a diverse vocal repertoire is especially appealing.”

She didn’t perform in the festival’s opening performance of Verdi’s “Requiem.”

“Instead, I gave them a list of singers who I thought would work well together,” Fleming said. “And I’m delighted with the group they came up with. J'Nai Bridges and Angela Meade are two of my favorite singers.”

But it is during the festival’s second week that we will have a chance to see Fleming in action.

On May 20, she participated in a program called “Music and Mind,” a longtime pet project of hers.

“It’s all about the connection between music and wellness,” Fleming said. “Physical wellness. Mental wellness. Music is one of the most complex things we as humans can do. And yet it is also one of the most basic. We are just beginning to understand the capacity that music has to heal.” The following day, May 21, she leads an open master class for young professional singers and pianists at Memorial Hall.

Her May 22 concert will feature Fleming and baritone Rod Gilfry singing Kevin Puts’ “The Brightness of Light,” a 12-section work exploring the relationship between painter Georgia O'Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, two of the most renowned artists of the 20th century. Also on the program are Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music” and Igor Stravinsky’s monumental “Symphony of Psalms.”

The festival’s May 24 closing night is a veritable showcase for the breadth of Fleming’s musical interests. It’s a program that is based on her 2023 Grammy-winning album “Voice of Nature - The Anthropocene.”

In the stage version of the “Voice of Nature,” Fleming is all over the musical map, from Handel (“Atalanta”) and Howard Shore (“Lord of the Rings”) to Mozart and Burt Bacharach/Hal David (“What the World Needs Now is Love”). The entire performance is set against the backdrop of a film created for Fleming by the National Geographic Society.

“It is a lot, isn’t it?” she said, pausing to reflect on the many projects she’s constantly juggling. She doesn’t perform opera as much as she used to. But she has scheduled performances of “Nixon in China” at the Opéra national de Paris in early 2026. “I love everything I’m doing. I tend to not want to give anything up. So ..." For a moment, she sounds almost apologetic about her nonstop schedule. But after a brief pause, she repeats what she said at the outset of our interview. “I love singing.”

Apparently, that explains it all.

May Festival

When: Through May 24.

Where: Music Hall, 1241 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine.

Tickets: $36-$126.

Information: 513-381-3300; www.mayfestival.com.