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Live From Lincoln Center, produced by Lincoln Center's John Goberman, makes the world's greatest artists accessible to home viewers in virtually every corner of the United States. It remains the only series of live broadcast performances on American television today. Approximately six major Lincoln Center performances are televised to a national audience of millions each year. In addition to its 13 Emmy Awards and 53 Emmy nominations, Live From Lincoln Center has won two George Foster Peabody Awards, two Grammy Awards, three Monitor Awards, a Television Critics Award and many others.

On April 6, in the Kaplan Penthouse at Lincoln Center, the beloved soprano Renée Fleming performs a concert of American music embracing works from the concert stage, Broadway and pop-rock, and Live From Lincoln Center is on hand to bring you the entire proceedings. The world of the concert hall is represented by Samuel Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" and John Kander's "A Letter from Sullivan Ballou." From the pop-rock arena are selections from Miss Fleming's "Dark Hope" CD, and from Broadway, she performs standards, old and new, and duets with superstar Josh Groban.

"Knoxville: Summer of 1915" began its life as a short story titled "Knoxville" by the famed American writer James Agee. Barber extracted passages from Agee's story and set them to music. Apparently, the Tennessee-born Agee and the Pennsylvania-born Barber had much in common. Both were born in 1910 and both retained precious memories of their childhoods. Agee wrote his "Knoxville" in 1938, when his father was dying. Barber composed "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" in 1947 when his father, too, was near death. In fact, Barber dedicated his score "In Memory of My Father" and described it as a "lyric rhapsody."

Agee's text is a dream-like evocation of a Southern evening. He wrote: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." According to a note by Agee, the words poured out of him and "took possibly an hour and a half" to write. "On revision I stayed about 98% faithful to the original." The music, too, apparently flowed out of Barber virtually spontaneously. The score was the result of a commission from the soprano Eleanor Steber, who sang the premiere in 1948 with Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The list of singers who have sung and recorded "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" reads like a who's who of American sopranos: Steber, of course, but also Leontyne Price, Dawn Upshaw, Evelyn Lear, Sylvia McNair, Kathleen Battle, Roberta Alexander and Barbara Hendricks. Renée Fleming has made the work a particular specialty of hers.

Who is or was Sullivan Ballou, the man named in the title of the piece"A Letter from Sullivan Ballou"? He was a 19th-century citizen of Rhode Island, an attorney and a modest politician who joined the Union Army when the Civil War broke out. He attained the rank of major and was killed in July, 1861 in the first Battle of Bull Run, at the age of 32. A week before he died, he wrote a long letter to his wife, Sarah, expressing his deep-felt emotions, prime among them was his abiding love for her. Among the most ecstatic lines are these: "Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield." John Kander, of the famous Broadway team of Kander (composer) and Ebb (lyricist), has set portions of the letter with music that is at once haunting and stirring. This work, too, has become a favorite of Renée Fleming's.

We know Renée Fleming as arguably the reigning soprano on today's opera and concert stages, but she spent her early years in the worlds of jazz and pop. During her studies at the Crane School of Music, at the State University of New York at Potsdam, she sang in a jazz trio. The illustrious jazz saxophonist Illinois Jacquet invited her to join his big band as vocalist, but she chose instead to pursue her studies at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester and at New York's Juilliard School. She earned her Juilliard tuition by way of singing jazz in and around New York. All this introduces you to her "other side" and one of her recent recordings whose content is aptly described by the disc’s title, "Dark Hope." The evening’s performance features songs from the CD, including such standouts as "Endlessly," "No One's Gonna Love You," "In Your Eyes," "Soul Meets Body" and Leonard Cohen's anthem "Hallelujah.” And from the Broadway musical stage, in duet with Josh Groban, are the numbers "Move On" from "Sunday in the Park with George" and "So in Love" from "Kiss Me, Kate," among others.

Join Live From Lincoln Center for a gala, intimate evening with Renée Fleming and her guest Josh Groban on Friday, April 6, 2012.

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© 2011 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. All Rights Reserved. Text by Martin Bookspan. Photos courtesy of Jonathan Tichler and Kurt Iswarienko.