Dear Friends, on behalf of Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS we are proud to present our contributions to the Aspen Music Festival and School’s seventy-sixth season.
Our flourishing program features wide-ranging offerings in opera, musical theater, and song; renowned guest artists; preeminent faculty across a range of vocal disciplines, including coaches from the world’s greatest opera houses; and, at the heart of it all, the most promising young singers from around the nation and the globe sharing their voices and their progress with you.
The composer Richard Strauss said “the human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play.” The endless expressive possibilities of singing inspire every moment of our work as we help a new generation of stars to master this art, with you to witness their journey.
This summer we present two fully-staged operas: Mozart’s coming-of-age comedy Così fan tutte, featuring the much-anticipated directorial debut of Renée Fleming; and the heartbreaking romance of Puccini’s unforgettable La bohème.
The former, presented in the iconic Wheeler Opera House, will be conducted by Patrick Summers in a wonderful collaboration between the co-artistic directors of our program.
La bohème, the timeless story of love and loss, will feature the return of world-famous tenor Matthew Polenzani.
Conducted by Enrique Mazzola and directed by Katherine M. Carter, Puccini’s masterpiece will once again bring bohemian Paris to the Klein Music Tent stage.
Other unforgettable vocal events will enrich our summer, including public artist development classes, scene workshops, cabarets, and concerts by vocal stars including soprano Ana María Martínez and mezzo-sopranos Isabel Leonard and Kelley O’Connor.
The world premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’s and Melissa Studdard’s theatrical oratorio Siddhartha, She will see the return of AOTVA’s own countertenor Key’mon Murrah. Our brilliant young artists, selected from all over the world, look forward to your enthusiastic welcome. We can’t wait to share their artistry with you all summer long!
Renée Fleming, Aspen Opera Ensemble alumna, is one of the most highly acclaimed singers of our time, performing on the stages of the world’s great opera houses and concert halls. Winner of five Grammy awards and the U. S. National Medal of Arts, she has sung for momentous occasions from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to the Super Bowl. In 2023 the World Health Organization appointed her as a Goodwill Ambassador for Arts and Health, and this year at Davos she became an inaugural member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Arts and Culture Council.
Recent opera performances include The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera and Nixon in China at the Opéra de Paris. In 2023 Renée received the Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo for Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, which inspired a current concert tour with a film created for the program by the National Geographic Society.
Renée’s anthology, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, was published in 2024. A prominent advocate for research at the intersection of arts, health, and neuroscience, she has given presentations in this field with scientists and practitioners around the world.
Renée is an artist-faculty member of the AMFS New Horizons Program, which is made possible by an endowment gift from Kay and Matthew Bucksbaum. Advisor for special projects at L.A. Opera and Artist Development Advisor for Wolf Trap Opera, her other awards include the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, Germany’s Cross of the Order of Merit, France’s Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, and honorary doctorates from ten universities. For more, visit www.reneefleming.com
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Patrick Summers is artistic and music director of the Houston Grand Opera, having been appointed music director in 1998 and artistic director in 2011. Summers has appeared at the Aspen Music Festival and School numerous times over the years in both symphony and opera settings. In 2019 he was named co-artistic director alongside Renée Fleming of the Festival’s redesigned opera program, Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS.
Highlights of his work with the HGO include conducting the company’s first-ever complete cycle of Wagner’s Ring and collaborating on more than a dozen world premieres, including Joel Thompson’s The Snowy Day, Tarik O’Regan’s The Phoenix, André Previn’s Brief Encounter, and Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Summers was principal guest conductor of the San Francisco Opera from 2009–16 and received the San Francisco Opera Medal in 2015.
A leading proponent of contemporary American opera, Summers has given more than twenty world premieres. He has conducted multiple recordings of new American operas, including Dead Man Walking, A Streetcar Named Desire, Florencia in the Amazon, Little Women, and others. Summers conducts a wide range of repertoire, from Baroque to bel canto to German Romantic, and has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Dallas Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, and others.
Summers’s The Spirit of This Place was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His articles on arts and education in the HGO program have become collectibles. Summers has published two novels in 2025: Key Change: An Alternative Biography of Mozart and A Collection of Brevities.
