Chicago – When the word “Opera” is defined today, the person that would illustrate the word is Renée Fleming. The lyric soprano has done most major female opera roles, and has written a new book … “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness” … and recently appeared at the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Renée Fleming has performed coloratura, lyric, and lighter spinto soprano operatic roles in Italian, German, French, Czech, and Russian, aside from her native English. A significant portion of her career has been the performance of new music, including world premieres of operas, concert pieces, and songs composed for her by André Previn, Caroline Shaw, Kevin Puts, Anders Hillborg, Nico Muhly, Henri Dutilleux, Brad Mehldau, and Wayne Shorter.
Renée Fleming at the Chicago Humanities Festival, May 8, 2024
Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com
Renée Lynn Fleming was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and got her Masters of...
Renée Fleming has performed coloratura, lyric, and lighter spinto soprano operatic roles in Italian, German, French, Czech, and Russian, aside from her native English. A significant portion of her career has been the performance of new music, including world premieres of operas, concert pieces, and songs composed for her by André Previn, Caroline Shaw, Kevin Puts, Anders Hillborg, Nico Muhly, Henri Dutilleux, Brad Mehldau, and Wayne Shorter.
Renée Fleming at the Chicago Humanities Festival, May 8, 2024
Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com
Renée Lynn Fleming was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and got her Masters of...
- 5/26/2024
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Flanked by UniFrance president Serge Toubiana and the National Orchestra of France, filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier stood before a rapt crowd at Paris’ Maison de la Radio this past Saturday to introduce an evening dedicated to French film scores called “May the Music Begin!”
That moniker – a reference to the original French title of his 1975 César winner “Let The Joy Reign Supreme” – highlighted Tavernier’s personal connection to this project.
“There are many unsung heroes of French cinema,” he explained, “but none more so than our composers.”
Working on a film and subsequent eight-part series, both titled “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the filmmaker became struck by the degree to which French composers had been overlooked in the official accounts of French film history – and spent many lonely years trying to rectify that.
“For five years I felt like I was wandering in the desert,” he reflected, “and then in one...
That moniker – a reference to the original French title of his 1975 César winner “Let The Joy Reign Supreme” – highlighted Tavernier’s personal connection to this project.
“There are many unsung heroes of French cinema,” he explained, “but none more so than our composers.”
Working on a film and subsequent eight-part series, both titled “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the filmmaker became struck by the degree to which French composers had been overlooked in the official accounts of French film history – and spent many lonely years trying to rectify that.
“For five years I felt like I was wandering in the desert,” he reflected, “and then in one...
- 1/21/2019
- by Ben Croll
- Variety Film + TV
Veteran French helmer Bertrand Tavernier (“The French Minister”) is curating a 15-film retrospective of films by Henri Decoin (1890-1969), a larger-than-life character who before directing his first feature, at the age of 43, was an Olympic swimmer, Wwi pilot, sports journalist and novelist.
Decoin is one of the three directors – alongside Jean Grémillon and Max Ophuls – featured in the first episode of Tavernier’s “My Journeys Through French Cinema,” a follow-up project to his documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema”.
Tavernier believes that Decoin left a decisive mark on Gallic cinema due to the fluidity of his directing style, inspired in part by his sojourn in Hollywood in 1938, his innovative exploration of genres such as crime, espionage thrillers, historical sagas and psychological dramas, his remarkable adaptations of novels by George Simenon and his notable collaboration with actors such as Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet and his second wife, Danielle Darrieux.
The retrospective...
Decoin is one of the three directors – alongside Jean Grémillon and Max Ophuls – featured in the first episode of Tavernier’s “My Journeys Through French Cinema,” a follow-up project to his documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema”.
Tavernier believes that Decoin left a decisive mark on Gallic cinema due to the fluidity of his directing style, inspired in part by his sojourn in Hollywood in 1938, his innovative exploration of genres such as crime, espionage thrillers, historical sagas and psychological dramas, his remarkable adaptations of novels by George Simenon and his notable collaboration with actors such as Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet and his second wife, Danielle Darrieux.
The retrospective...
- 10/18/2018
- by Martin Dale
- Variety Film + TV
Her Silent SeamingPerhaps more than most other forms of cinema, experimental film and video is an auteur’s medium through and through. Since the production model for avant-garde work is almost exclusively artisanal, with a single individual (or possibly a duo or an artists’ collective) making the work from a studio context similar to that or a sculptor or photographer, it only makes sense to consider these works are expressions of an artist’s point of view. As such, those of us who regularly engage with experimental work will inevitably use the artist as the primary mode of categorization—who to keep track of, who seems promising, etc.But there’s a bit more to it. One of the greatest joys of avant-garde filmgoing, as any fan will tell you, is seeing an expertly curated program of films, be they new short works, recontextualized classics, or some combination thereof. A...
- 1/22/2016
- by Michael Sicinski
- MUBI
In the wake of the terrible attacks in Paris, I found myself listening to a lot of French music and thinking about the Leonard Bernstein quote going around on Facebook: "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." This list came to seem like my natural response. A very small response, I know. This list is chronological and leaves off people I should probably include. The forty [note: now forty-one] composers listed below are merely a start.
Léonin Aka Leoninus (c.1135-c.1201)
The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the 1100s was a major musical center, and Léonin (the first named composer from whom we have notated polyphonic music) was a crucial figure for defining the liturgical use of organum, the first polyphony. Earlier organum was fairly simple, involving parallel intervals and later contrary motion, but the mid-12th century brought...
Léonin Aka Leoninus (c.1135-c.1201)
The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the 1100s was a major musical center, and Léonin (the first named composer from whom we have notated polyphonic music) was a crucial figure for defining the liturgical use of organum, the first polyphony. Earlier organum was fairly simple, involving parallel intervals and later contrary motion, but the mid-12th century brought...
- 11/15/2015
- by SteveHoltje
- www.culturecatch.com
'I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did'
Sidney Lumet's 1974 film version of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express was something of a landmark in crime cinema. The star-studded cast (Bacall, Bergman, Connery, Finney, Gielgud, Redgrave . . .) and lavish production values provided both the template for later movie adaptations of Christie's work and paved the way for the successful trend of high-end television crime series. Richard Rodney Bennett, who had been writing for the screen since he was 18, and who was a technically brilliant classical composer with a deep knowledge of 1930s popular music, was an ideal choice to write the score.
"Stephen Sondheim recommended me," recalls Bennett. "And as soon as I saw the rushes I told Sidney that no one in their right mind was going to be scared out their wits by Agatha Christie.
Sidney Lumet's 1974 film version of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express was something of a landmark in crime cinema. The star-studded cast (Bacall, Bergman, Connery, Finney, Gielgud, Redgrave . . .) and lavish production values provided both the template for later movie adaptations of Christie's work and paved the way for the successful trend of high-end television crime series. Richard Rodney Bennett, who had been writing for the screen since he was 18, and who was a technically brilliant classical composer with a deep knowledge of 1930s popular music, was an ideal choice to write the score.
"Stephen Sondheim recommended me," recalls Bennett. "And as soon as I saw the rushes I told Sidney that no one in their right mind was going to be scared out their wits by Agatha Christie.
- 7/22/2011
- by Nicholas Wroe
- The Guardian - Film News
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