Renée Fleming wants to rock and roll

“It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled”

The Kennedy Cen­ter Hon­ors were broad­cast on tv recently. This year the hon­orees were Bill T. Jones, Oprah Win­frey, Jerry Her­man, Merle Hag­gard, and Paul McCart­ney. (Notice that three of them are songwriters!)

As Sir Paul’s music was being per­formed on stage, the cam­era cut to the audi­ence and I noticed Renée Flem­ing in the audi­ence, and she was rock­ing and rolling and look­ing like she was hav­ing a great time. In short, she was hav­ing fun. I thought, “that’s some­thing clas­si­cal music really needs– the abil­ity to just have fun.”

You never see an audi­ence at a clas­si­cal music in united rap­ture of one sort or another, yet you see this in pop music con­certs all the time.