“I don’t want to hit people over the head and make them sorry they came to the concert,” Renee Fleming said with a smile, “But I do want a sort of collective ‘We love the planet.’”
At 66, Fleming has lost none of the beauty and glamour which, combined with her exquisite voice and dramatic ability, has made her one of the world’s greatest opera stars. She seems indefatigable – the city was the second stop in Asia following Shanghai – and she gave three lectures in Hong Kong in addition to her two concerts.
What drives her is her desire to bring home the message about sustainability and biodiversity, she said.
Fleming had always been interested in how so much of the great poetry of the 19th century had framed the human condition through the lens of nature, and then set to music, she said. Yet later art songs tend to deal with other subjects. “So I wanted to compare our relationship with nature in that period with now.”