Carnegie Hall

Renée Fleming 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. Honored with five Grammy Awards and the US National Medal of Arts, she has sung for momentous occasions from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to the Diamond Jubilee Concert for Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. In 2014, she brought her voice to a vast new audience when she became the first classical artist ever to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl.

Ms. Fleming’s current concert calendar includes appearances in London, Vienna, Milan, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In November, she starred in the world premiere staging of The Hours, a new opera based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and award-winning film, at the Metropolitan Opera. In March, she portrayed Pat Nixon in a new production of Nixon in China at the Paris Opera. She stars in an upcoming series of IMAX films, Renée Fleming’s Cities That Sing, highlighting the music of great cultural capitals, with performances and visits to notable locations.

Ms. Fleming’s recording Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. A collection of classical songs and world premieres with Yannick Nézet-Séguin as pianist, the album focuses on nature as both inspiration and casualty of humans. Her most recent album, released in January by Decca, is a two-disc compilation of her greatest live moments at the Metropolitan Opera, including some material never before released.

In recent years, Ms. Fleming has become a leading advocate for research at the intersection of arts, health, and neuroscience. As artistic advisor to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, she launched the first ongoing collaboration between America’s national cultural center and the National Institutes of Health. She has presented her program Music and the Mind in more than 50 cities around the world, and launched Music and Mind LIVE, a weekly web show that amassed nearly 700,000 views from 70 countries.

In addition to leading SongStudio at Carnegie Hall, Ms. Fleming is co-director of the Aspen Opera Center and VocalARTS at the Aspen Music Festival, and advisor for special projects at LA Opera. Her other honors include the 2023 Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, Germany’s Cross of the Order of Merit, and France’s Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. For more information, visit reneefleming.com.

Evgeny Kissin’s musicality, the depth and poetic quality of his interpretations, and his extraordinary virtuosity have earned him the veneration and admiration deserved only by one of the most gifted classical pianists of his generation and, arguably, generations past. He is in demand the world over, and has appeared with many of the world’s great conductors, including Claudio Abbado, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Christoph von Dohnányi, Carlo Maria Giulini, Lorin Maazel, Riccardo Muti, and Seiji Ozawa, as well as all the great orchestras of the world.

Mr. Kissin was born in Moscow in October 1971, and began to play by ear and improvise on the piano at the age of two. At six years old, he entered a special school for gifted children, the Moscow Gnessin School of Music, where he was a student of Anna Pavlovna Kantor, who has been his only teacher. At the age of 10, he made his concerto debut playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 and gave his first solo recital in Moscow one year later. Mr. Kissin came to international attention in March 1984 when, at the age of 12, he performed Chopin’s piano concertos nos. 1 and 2 in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitri Kitaenko. This concert was recorded live by Melodiya, and a two-LP album was released the following year. Given the astounding success of this recording, Melodiya proceeded to release five more LPs of live performances in Moscow in the two years that followed.

During the 2022–2023 season, Mr. Kissin returns to the Vienna Philharmonic with Jakub Hrůša, the London Symphony Orchestra with Sir Simon Rattle, the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra with Kent Nagano, and the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra with Andrey Boreyko, among others. In January, he began a recital tour of Europe with Renée Fleming, performing a program of Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Duparc in Vienna’s Musikverein, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The two artists take the same program on a tour of North America this month, stopping at the Kennedy Center, Chicago, Gilmore Piano Festival, and Carnegie Hall. Mr. Kissin also tours North America with a solo recital program.