Renée Fleming to Make Directing Debut at Aspen Festival

Fleming will direct a fully staged student performance of Mozart's "Così fan tutte," set in a Masachusetts high school in the 1980s

It has recently been announced that soprano Renée Fleming will make her directorial debut at the 2025 Aspen Music Festival, where she will direct a production of Mozart's Così fan tutte. The show is set to run from July 21 to 26, with three performances on offer.

The production will be held at the Wheeler Opera House and will feature a student cast, conducted by Patrick Summers. He and Fleming have been co-artistic directors of the Aspen Opera Theater and Vocal Arts Program since 2019.

Fleming was due to direct the same work in 2021, with the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center, but the performances were canceled on account of the pandemic.

A renowned soprano, she has appeared with all the major orchestras of Europe and North America and collaborated with conductors including Daniel Barenboim, Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, Bernard Haitink, James Levine, the late Sir Charles Mackerras, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Antonio Pappano, André Previn, Christian Thielemann, Michael Tilson Thomas and the late Sir Georg Solti.

Fleming recently resigned from her role as Artistic Advisor at Large to the Kennedy Center in protest of its new management and was subsequently appointed to a three-year term as Artist Development Advisor at Wolf Trap Opera.

"It's supposed to be royalty or aristocracy," Fleming said of the production. "I’m putting this more in high school, 1980, Yarmouth, Massachusetts, at the beginning of World Wide Wrestling...also, the early '80s was Jane Fonda aerobics."

"She is such a polymath," Summers said. "I’ve known very few people in the opera industry as intelligent and as nice as Renée Fleming."