Renée Fleming to make directing debut at Aspen Festival this July in Mozart’s ‘Cosi fan tutte’

ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — Soprano Renée Fleming will make her directing debut in Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” at the Aspen Festival with three performances from July 21-26.

While Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte set their opera about fiancee-swapping in 18th century Naples, Italy, Fleming is shifting the work to a contemporary setting, the company announced Wednesday.

“It’s supposed to be royalty or aristocracy,” she said. “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.”

Fleming, who turned 66 last week, continues to sing in recitals and in a few contemporary operas but gave her last staged performance from the central repertoire in 2017.

Patrick Summers will conduct a student cast at the Wheeler Opera House. Summers and Fleming have been co-artistic directors of the Aspen Opera Theater and Vocal Arts Program since 2019.

“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.”

Fleming was to have directed “Cosi” for the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center starting Feb. 27, 2021, with Paulo Szot as Don Alfonso, but the production was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fleming last week resigned as artistic adviser at large to the Kennedy Center after Deborah Rutter was fired as the organization’s president and President Donald Trump replaced David Rubenstein as chairman.

The Aspen Festival runs from July 2 to Aug. 24 and includes the world premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’ “Siddhartha, She” on Aug. 2. The gender-swapping music drama based on Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel “Siddhartha” has a libretto by Melissa Studdard and is conducted by Robert Spano, the festival’s music director since 2011.