Saturday, January 4, 2025
8:00 PM
Kevin Puts tells the impassioned love story of painter Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, in The Brightness of Light, a BSO commission composed for soprano Renée Fleming. The program opens with two high-spirited Mozart works dating from his early Vienna years, when he was creating a new life as an independent composer.
Andris Nelsons, conductor
Renée Fleming, soprano
Rod Gilfry, baritone
MOZART Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio
MOZART Symphony No. 36, Linz
Kevin PUTS The Brightness of Light
This concert was recorded on Nov. 22, 2024, and is not available on demand.
In a conversation with WCRB's Brian McCreath, Renée Fleming and Rod Gilfrey describe their long friendship and working relationship, inhabiting the characters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, and the relationship of music and health. To listen, use the player above, and read the transcript below.
Read the Boston Symphony's program notes for this concert.
Hear Renée Fleming on GBH's The Culture Show.
WCRB INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at Symphony Hall with Renée Fleming and Rod Gilfry, both here at the hall for The Brightness of Light by Kevin Puts, and Renée and Rod, I'm so pleased that you have a little bit of time for me. Thank you.
Renée Fleming Delighted to be here.
Rod Gilfry Yeah, this is great. Really happy to do this.
Brian McCreath I want to just start with a little bit of deeper background than just this piece. I'm curious about the relationship you guys have as professionals and whether, before the 2019 premiere of this piece, how much work you had done together before then. Maybe, Rod, you can start.
Rod Gilfry Do you want to tell the story, Renée?
Renée Fleming It's a good story. No, Rod, you're better at it.
Rod Gilfry Well, we have known each other – I'm not going to say the date. We have known each other for 39 years.
Renée Fleming Okay, that's a ... [laughs]
Rod Gilfry That's a date? That's not a date. I mean, you have to do math. They'd have to do math to figure it out.
Renée Fleming That's true. People are busy, you're right.
Rod Gilfry We met in Belgium doing a vocal competition in – I won't say the date – a long time ago.
Renée Fleming In Verviers.
Rod Gilfry In Verviers, Belgium, and we got put up with the same family. They housed us. We had rooms across the hall from each other. Neither of us had careers; neither of us spoke any French. And yeah, that's when it all began.
Renée Fleming Yep.
Brian McCreath So, they must have put you together because, well, here's the two young Americans. We'll just throw them in a house together.
Renée Fleming I don't know. Were we the only Americans? In any case, I won, the first time that I really won first prize in a competition. And he won Best Young Artist.
Rod Gilfry "Best Young Artist." I think I won The Youngest Artist. I don't think it was much distinction.
Renée Fleming No, you were the best. You were the best. And he was two weeks younger than I am. But, what's interesting about this experience is that I didn't really then see him or work with him for decades because his career started in Europe and mine started in the U.S. So, we didn't connect again until [André Previn’s opera] Streetcar Named Desire.
Rod Gilfry Streetcar Named Desire.
Brian McCreath Oh, wow, yeah. Right, in...
Rod Gilfry Years later...
Renée Fleming In 1998.
Brian McCreath But when The Brightness of Light became a real thing, Renée, when you were working with Kevin on the Georgia O'Keeffe songs, was it immediately apparent that, to fulfill the role of Stieglitz, you would want to turn to Rod?
Renée Fleming You know, I don't recall how that worked, but Rod's a fantastic choice. He's really embodied him so perfectly, I think.
Rod Gilfry Well, thanks, Renée.
Renée Fleming With the gruffness. And, you know, he's supposed to be much older than her.
Rod Gilfry Yeah, he is. He's supposed to be, like, 20 years older than Georgia O'Keeffe. When I was asked if I'd be interested in doing Georgia O'Keeffe's husband, I had to scramble to say, "Wait, wait a second, wait. Georgia O'Keeffe had a husband?" I had no idea. And I think it's probably because she outlived him by 40 years. And so, that's really when her career was established, and so we didn't really hear much about him. I'm going to say that's why I didn't know. That's the reason for my ignorance. [laughter] But I'm sure glad I got to do it because it's been so great to do this.
Renée Fleming But the tome of letters are extraordinary and incredibly... I mean, everything in their relationship, and the way people wrote, it was just so colorful and rich, sexy, I mean, it was really everything. And Kevin did a fabulous job of curating the letters, the order of the letters. It's not even completely true to the timeline of their relationship in every case, but it works so fabulously. And Kevin has this extraordinary gift for making landscapes with music. I mean, you can see everything that's being described. He's so gifted in that way. His orchestration is colorful. And I feel like he really hits the sweet spot between quality and accessibility for the audience.
Rod Gilfry Absolutely.
Renée Fleming So, it's extraordinary quality, but it's also something people can grasp.
Brian McCreath Well, I want to come back to those landscapes in a second, and Kevin Puts's way of depicting landscapes. But first, actually, Rod, you opened a little door here that I can't resist walking through, which is how exactly you do embody a character. Now, you both have, I don't know how many roles each of you has sung. It's got to be in the dozens between the two of you in the opera world. And the preparation to play a role, it must be all over the map because, of course, many characters are simply made-up. They're fiction. But when it comes to portraying an actual historical figure, what is the process of learning how to embody that person in a musical interpretation, Rod?
Rod Gilfry Well, you know, you start by reading as much as you can on the person, get a feel for the personality. Of course, now, Alfred Stieglitz lived in New York City his entire life. He was very much a New York guy. And I toyed with the idea, should I do like a New York accent for this whole thing? And I thought that would be so distracting. So I decided not to do that except for a couple key words. I think what it comes down to, though, is you've got to interpret the words, the situations that you're actually singing. You can't bring everything into it. And so, I try to mostly convey the emotion of those letters, the great regret, the feeling of loneliness. I mean, it was a troubled relationship and very sad in the end. She moved off to the southwest and he stayed in New York, and they grew apart.
Renée Fleming They never saw each other again. She never went back. So, it's extraordinary, too, I think, because we have typically played characters that were fictional for most of our careers. So, that's kind of a made-up landscape. You try to learn about the period more than anything. And obviously if we were in costume, it would be different. And because we know what her voice sounds like, there's documentary footage of her and how she looked and how strong she was. It's probably kind of strange if you're very tied to hearing a soprano, because if you were going to cast someone closer to her, it would be a gravelly mezzo-soprano.
Rod Gilfry Right.
Renée Fleming So, we do our best. And if we were in costume, it would be slightly different. But I think people, just, as you said, think about the letters that they wrote to each other and the images. This media piece that's on the screen is so artfully created and so beautiful and surprising, so surprising. I had never seen these extraordinary photographs he took of her early on that are incredibly intimate. And I had also never seen the footage of them together in the relationship.
Rod Gilfry Right. I had never seen that either.
Brian McCreath Where does the actual artwork that they both created enter into your conception of the character and giving them voice?
Renée Fleming I think it's incredibly important. I mean, one of the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had in the art world – and I love art; I'm constantly going to museums wherever I travel – is the visit to [O'Keeffe's home in New Mexico at] Ghost Ranch because just feeling that you were there, that you saw the exact things that she painted, the thought of her taking a push broom and pushing out rattlesnakes first thing in the morning when she went to her studio... Everything about it was just so evocative and you realize the courage that she had to leave her life and go out there and just stay and find that she thought it was her home. And the light is extraordinary there.
Rod Gilfry It is.
Renée Fleming There are no sunglasses that can protect you from the light I found in Santa Fe when I've been there in the summer.
Brian McCreath Well, I actually have been to Ghost Ranch. And what I remember best is actually nighttime. When you can look up and see more stars than you ever could have possibly conceived existed. And I don't know how much she painted - I'm not an expert on Georgia O'Keeffe – I don't know how much she painted nighttime scenes, but it's also an extraordinary part. It is an extraordinary landscape.
Renée Fleming That's amazing. I envy you having that experience. And her museum also in Santa Fe is fantastic.
Rod Gilfry Yeah, it's a really a great museum.
Renée Fleming A lot of the material in this piece is from that museum because they allowed us to use it.
Brian McCreath Did Stieglitz's art in any way kind of filter into your conception of him?
Rod Gilfry Well, not really. I mean, his art was photography, and he took some fantastic pictures. They're really beautiful. He was also a real innovator of the photographic process. He invented a lot of processes that then became standard technology for the photo industry. But as I said, I take it most from the letters. You know, you see pictures of him. You wouldn't imagine that he's that emotional of a guy. You know, she calls him her "little boy." And I think that is indicative of their relationship, that she was really the dominant one. And he could be very childish. And I think that's very evident in the texts that Kevin chose to put into the piece.
Brian McCreath How many performances has this piece done since that world premiere in 2019? I mean, roughly, has it been a pretty common thing?
Renée Fleming Yeah, it's probably 12, I would think.
Rod Gilfry Yeah.
Renée Fleming I mean, I'd have to really think about it. And it's a lot.
Rod Gilfry Like, 12 orchestras, in multiple performances for many of them.
Renée Fleming With each of them, yeah, so many more performances in that 12 orchestras. But I just pulled that number out of my head.
Rod Gilfry I think it's about right. I counted it up one time. I think this might be lucky number 13. [Laughs]
Brian McCreath Well, at any rate, with a big old pandemic in the middle of it, that's a fairly frequent level of performance for a piece. And you so you've really lived with it. It's ingrained into your system now. Is there a way that this piece in 2024 feels different in its resonances and its emotional content than it did in 2019, either because of the world around us or where you guys are in your lives now?
Rod Gilfry There's a line that she sings: "It's absurd the way I love this country." That tears me up every time. And I think it has incredible resonance now. I'll just say the election didn't go the way I wanted it to go. And so, I'm sort of in mourning. And that line hits me harder than it ever has in all of our performances.
Renée Fleming I agree. No, I feel the same way. It comes in the last movement, which is so incredibly beautiful, and it's meant to evoke her death in a way. And so, every time I sing that page, that entire page of lines, I just think, I can't go there. [laughs] We always have to maintain a sort of control so that we can sing and the audience can cry.
Rod Gilfry Yeah, we do.
Brian McCreath Isn't that the definition of being an opera singer, though, right? Or almost any musician, you have to maintain your own sort of, not distance, but somehow you have to be above it so that you don't sink into it, I suppose, if that's the way to put it.
Rod Gilfry Yeah. We can't laugh or cry for the audience. They need to do that on their own. And of course, we also have to maintain our vocal composure so we don't... if you start to cry, you can't sing, and we kind of have to sing.
Renée Fleming But I try to go right to the edge because the audience knows when you're emotional and when you're invested in feeling what you're singing. And so, you really want to go there, just not tip over because then the audience backs away and thinks, "Oh, poor thing," you know?
Rod Gilfry Right. Right. It becomes about you.
Renée Fleming Exactly. Yes. It's about you then. And they are distanced.
Brian McCreath This piece came up not long after, Renée, you really started going all in on the health and arts and medicine, the mind and all that. And I'm listening to you sing this now, and I don't want to draw the thread too strongly. Maybe it's too thin of a thread, but it feels like we're witnessing in this piece a lot of what you've been exploring, as Georgia O'Keeffe uses her art to work through her own issues, and maybe Alfred Stieglitz did, too.
Renée Fleming I'm sure. I think all artists do. You know, first of all, we all have issues to work through. And then there's the physical benefit. That's what science is teaching us, is, for instance, when I sing, I feel so much happier. And when I'm done, I've stimulated the vagus nerve, you know, my endorphins and all these positive hormones have been released in the brain. And the audience, we have a shared experience. Brainwaves are literally aligning. Our heart rates are aligning in a concert, which is why I tell people, go to live performances, it's so good for you.
Rod Gilfry My mother is 94 and she sings in the community she's in. They have a little choir, and she sings in that choir. She says she's not very good, but after every one of their rehearsals, when I talk to her on the phone, she sounds like a million bucks because it really is good for your health. It's good for your mind, it's good for your emotions. I believe you can sing yourself to health. I've done it many times.
Brian McCreath That's beautiful. That's really wonderful. Well, Renée Fleming, Rod Gilfry, thank you so much for bringing this piece to Symphony Hall. I remember it so well from 2019 at Tanglewood, and it's just a gift to now have it here in Boston. Thanks for your time today.
Renée Fleming Thank you so much. I appreciate this.
Rod Gilfry Thank you. Thank you, Brian.