Four Last Songs - Harry Potter 6 Books

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Frühling
2. September
3. Beim Schlafengehen
4. Im Abendrot
5. Ach! Wo war ich? Tot? ...
6. Ein Schönes war
7. Es gibt ein Reich
8. Verführung, op. 33 no. 1
9. Freundliche Vision, op. 48 no. 1
10. Winterweihe, op. 48 no. 4
11. Zueignung, op. 10 no. 1
12. Zweite Brautnacht!

Disc 2:

1. Eugene Onegin--Letter Scene
2. Rusalka--Song to the Moon
3. Otello--Willow Song...Ave Maria
4. Thaïs--Ah! Je suis seule...Dis-moi que je suis belle
5. Capriccio--Moonlight Music & Final Scene

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2894 in Music
• Released on: 2008-09-16
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Deluxe Edition, Extra tracks

Album Description
This is the special, deluxe edition! In addition to the Strauss program, a second disc which highlights Fleming's signature roles at the Metropolitan Opera is included. These extended scenes are drawn from her highly-regarded Decca discography. Renée Fleming, the world's preeminent lyric soprano, is joined by Christian Thielemann, internationally acclaimed for his performances of Strauss works, for this recording of the exquisitely beautiful Four Last Songs. These enduringly popular works have become signature pieces for the soprano and she was delighted for the opportunity to work with the gifted Thielemann. In addition, Fleming performs a selection of lieder with orchestra as well as arias from Ariadne auf Naxos and Die ägyptische Helena.. On September 22, Fleming will open the Met Opera Season with a Gala featuring her in her most acclaimed roles. This one-night-only performance will be broadcast live in HD to movie theaters throughout the US.

Chicago Sun-Times
"With her silken tones, stunning technique, vocal intelligence and regal presence, Fleming remains a class apart, the definitive Strauss interpreter of our time."

About the Artist
Renée Fleming's luminous sound, brilliant stage presence and superb artistry are just a few of the qualities that make her one of the world's most beloved and recognisable musical figures. Her freshness and purity of tone, together with an exceptional musical intelligence and grace, continue to enchant audiences worldwide. As a passionate champion of creativity in the arts, she continues to be a proponent of new music and an advocate of overlooked masterpieces.

Ms Fleming's 2007-08 season brought her to the opera houses of New York, Chicago and Vienna. She appeared in two of her signature roles with the Metropolitan Opera: Violetta in La traviata, in November 2007, and Desdemona in Otello, in February 2008. She repeated La traviata for the Lyric Opera of Chicago in January 2008, and in June, she appeared at the Vienna State Opera in a new production of Strauss's Capriccio. Renée Fleming stars in the Metropolitan Opera's 2008-09 Opening Night Gala in September 2008, in fully staged performances of scenes from three different operas: Verdi's La traviata (Act II), Massenet's Manon (Act III), and the final scene from Richard Strauss's Capriccio -- before returning to Vienna for further performances of Capriccio. In November 2008 Ms Fleming sings the title role in Lucrezia Borgia for Washington National Opera, conducted by Plácido Domingo, and in December 2008 she appears in Thaïs at the Metropolitan Opera.

A much-loved and warmly welcomed artist throughout the world, Ms Fleming performed at the 2007-08 season opening night galas of the National Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and the Dallas Opera presented her in solo concert to celebrate their 50th anniversary. Other highlights included the world premiere of the song cycle Le Temps L'Horloge, written for her by Henri Dutilleux, which she debuted in September with Seiji Ozawa at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan. Later in the season, she performed it with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Boston's Symphony Hall and in New York's Carnegie Hall. In Spring 2008, Renée Fleming performed Strauss's Four Last Songs plus a program of R. Strauss songs and arias with the Munich Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann, recorded for this Decca album.

In November 2007, Decca released the Los Angeles Opera's production of La traviata on DVD, featuring Renée Fleming, Rolando Villazón and Renato Bruson. Her performances in Eugene Onegin (Metropolitan Opera, New York) and Arabella (Zurich Opera) were captured on film and released on Decca DVD in 2007/2008. A two-time Grammy winner, Ms Fleming's CD Homage -- The Age of the Diva, was released in the fall of 2006 and is comprised of rarely-heard works associated with legendary singers of the past. In recent years, this nine-time Grammy nominated artist has recorded everything from Strauss's complete Daphne to the jazz recording Haunted Heart, to the movie soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and has been honoured with a 2006 Echo Award for her recording of Strauss's Daphne, as well as the Classical Brit Awards in 2004 for Outstanding Contribution to Music and in 2003 for Female Artist of the Year.

In May 2007, the DVD production of Capriccio, with Ms Fleming singing the title role, was awarded the Prix Maria Callas Orphée d'Or by the Académie du Disque Lyric, which awarded her the inaugural Prix Solti Orphée d'Or in 1996.

Renée Fleming's artistry has been an inspiration to many other prominent artists, such as Chuck Close and Robert Wilson, whose portraits of her were included in the Metropolitan Opera's 2007 fund-raising auction. A portrait of Ms Fleming was also created by Francesco Clemente, who displayed the work at Salzburg's Easter Festival in Spring 2007. Among her numerous awards are the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government (2005), which was preceded by the Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2002); Honorary Membership in the Royal Academy of Music (2003); and a 2003 honorary doctorate from The Juilliard School, where she was also commencement speaker.

An advocate for literacy, Renée Fleming has been featured in promotional campaigns for the Association of American Publishers (Get Caught Reading), and the Magazine Publishers of America's READ poster campaign for the American Library Association. She was honored by The New York Public Library as a "Library Lion". Her book, The Inner Voice, was published by Viking Penguin in 2004, and released in paperback by Penguin the following year. An intimate account of her career and creative process, the book is also published in France by Éditions Fayard, in the United Kingdom by Virgin Books, by Henschel Verlag in Germany, and Shunjusha in Japan.

In addition to her work on stage and in recordings, Renée Fleming has represented Rolex timepieces in print advertising since 2001. Master Chef Daniel Boulud has created the dessert "La Diva Renée" (1999) in her honor, and she has inspired the "Renée Fleming Iris" (2004), which is being replicated in porcelain by Boehm. Having been added to Mr Blackwell's best dressed list in 2001, her gowns have been designed by Gianfranco Ferré, Issey Miyake, Bill Blass, Vivienne Westwood, Angel Sanchez, Oscar de la Renta and John Galliano for Dior.

Renée Fleming, who was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Rochester, New York, studied at The Juilliard School, holds degrees from the State University of New York at Potsdam and the Eastman School of Music, and was a Fulbright Scholar for study in Germany. Early awards included the Metropolitan Opera National Auditions, the Richard Tucker Award, and the George London Prize. She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Hall Corporation and of the Advisory Board of the White Nights Foundation of America.

Customer Reviews

The Best of the Best
Renee Fleming is without doubt one of the best Divas we have seen (or heard) on stage at the Met. She does not only possess an amazing voice but she is also beautiful to look at. Both discs included in this package are well worth the price I paid on Amazon, which was much less than I could have bought them at the music store where they happened to be sold out.
The Four last Songs are beautiful and sad, exquisitely performed. The selection from the Met is more familiar, but I know I will listen again and again.

sempre meglio
This set of glorious performances by Renee Fleming, both the older ones included on the bonus disk and the new ones, especially the new versions of Strauss's Vier Letzte Lieder, seem to me so fine as to be nearly beyond praise. Listening to them, especially after reading some of the more critical comments here, has taken me back some 50 years to when I was a young lad in LA diving into the world of great singing, all on LPs then. There was much discussion in those days about Renata Tebaldi and Maria Callas -- in fact, there was a debate, and sometimes a bitter one, about whether Tebaldi was better than Callas, or Callas better than Tebaldi. (A similar debate was going on over the different sorts of violin playing offered by Francescatti and Heifetz.) This debate struck me then, and strikes me still, as an utterly absurd and foolish argument. It is not a question of "better". It was, it is, a matter of what seem to me two diverse modes of beauty, both supremely fine. Tebaldi's singing was lusher, more lyrical; Callas's was more dramatic, more intense. And they were both singing gloriously. You had both of them available to you. You didn't have to choose between, so why would you? You just had to learn to be open to the beauty in both. And if you arrived at cherishing both, wouldn't you just have loved to hear a singer who could somehow combine features of both modes?

That is just what Renee Fleming has so generously offered us in recent years. She began more in the Tebaldi mode, as Szolti recognized, and in that mode issued her early performance of the Strauss songs as well as a number of other disks. Then over the last decade or so she has gradually instilled a greater dramatic intensity into her singing. And she has done so without losing or marring any of the beauty of her voice. It is still as lush and rich, as lyrical, still as astounding in range and timbre and control as it ever was, but now in miraculous combination has also a new and powerful dramatic intensity. When I listened to this latest performance of the Letzte Lieder, I felt that no performance of them that I had ever heard before was more beautiful, more intense, more moving. This performance by Fleming seems to me to reside -- with some others I also wouldn't want to lose -- quite at the top. There's no "better" among the best.

A few times I sensed a resemblance to, or slight echo of Schwarzkopf; once or twice I found myself remembering Janet Baker's renderings of Mahler or Schubert songs, for their dramatic intensity. But these were just awestruck sideglances into quite different musical worlds. Fleming is always herself, always recognizable and memorable, and incomparably fine. And now she has by some miracle become even finer than before. I still listen to her earlier versions of these songs and treasure them. But now my world seems richer and finer because I also have these incomparable new performances. The kind of intensity she now brings to them makes them something beyond beautiful, makes them so powerful and moving that I have to guard against the impulse to play them over and over without stop. She creates so compelling a world of experience that I don't want to leave it -- would like to dwell there perpetually. The sensible person in me says "don't wear them out". Hard to resist, though.

I'd like to end by expressing my gratitude to Renee Fleming. It seems to me to have taken considerable courage to alter an already highly successful mode of performance. There were risks. And something mysterious was involved as well, something more than the intelligence and diligence with which she is clearly amply gifted. Some other gift. I won't try to name it. But she has now passed its gleanings to us, and I for one am deeply grateful. Thank you, Renee. All honor to you.

A triumphant collaboration between Fleming and Thielemann
It says something sad about the current state of opera recordings that Renee Fleming hasn't been given a complete Strauss role on disc besides Daphne, not the Marschallin or Ariadne. As evidenced here, she is uniquely gifted to assume those roles, as well as to sing Strauss's orchestral songs. Compared to her 1995 version with Eschenbach (BMG), the new one marks a quantum leap in artistry. Fleming won a Fulbright fellowship to study in Germany as a young singer, and her ability to find meaning in Hesse's poetry in the Four Last Songsis impresive. I think only Schwarzkopf surpasses her in that regard. And Fleming can spin out a long pianissimo better than anyone since Caballe in her prime.

Thielemann is also a finer conductor than Eschenbach. He and his soloist have crafted a thoughtful, highly nuanced interpreatation, generally moving at a slow pace, that touches the heart of the music(I couldn't say that about her earlier account, where rapturous vocalism was the whole show). What other reviewers call overacting is expressivity -- Fleming obviously feels this music deeply and has reached that time in an artist's career when she can fully communicate anything she wants to. Her Ariadne excerpts are poignant and rival even Schwarzkopf in beauty.

My only criticism is that she starts a fraction off pitch and strains at the beginning of the Four Last Songs, no doubt because of the live concert setting. But soon everything is vocally in place. Contrary to what one sour reivewr claims, there's little decline in Fleming's voice since 13 years ago. Time has been kind, and Fleming has repaid that kindness by growing steadily in artistry.