- [Media] In partnership with the Curtis Institute of Music, WHYY presents the following program.

- My name is Sarah Fleiss.

I'm a soprano, currently in my third year at Curtis and I study opera.

(audience applauding) I performed a pretty small recital of two different sets of music.

The first set that I did was a Bottesini set for high voice and bass.

So I got to sing with my friend Jason, who's a great bassist, and Ting Ting Wang, my pianist.

The first set was about love and tragedy and kind of the tragedy that happens when you lose a love.

(gentle music) (singing in foreign language) I started singing at a really young age.

I have some distant memories from me at three years old singing on cruise ships and singing for my family members.

And it was always just a very natural thing for me to do.

I always loved to sing and to perform.

♪ I'm just a someone in an old museum ♪ My parents picked up on this and they put me in voice lessons at age seven, I believe.

So I started at my local JCC, and I started out singing mainly musical theater, and I kind of did that for a really long time.

Performed in musicals and shows, and it was just fun for me.

It's just what I loved to do all of the time.

♪ Wishing better moments would arrive ♪ High school, I started doing more classical repertoire.

So my voice teacher for a while, she was a mezzo-soprano, and she kind of started to nudge me into the classical direction more as a kind of technical thing.

And I ended up liking it a lot.

And my senior year of high school, I auditioned for Juiliard Pre-College, and I ended up going and that was kind of my first big push into classical music and singing opera.

I went to Columbia University and did more academics 'cause I love academics.

(singing in foreign language) I luckily found Curtis and ended up transferring to Curtis and now I'm here really pursuing opera.

(singing in foreign language) The three Faure Songs to me, went through the time of someone's life.

I think you can look at them forwards or backwards.

And the second piece, "Notre Amour," is about love and our love, and our love is sacred, our love is charming and kind of this exuberant feeling of when you're with someone.

(singing in foreign language) The third piece is almost like a silent prayer.

It's called "Le Secret" and it's very mysterious.

I never say what the secret is, but it's almost like the longing at the end of someone's life.

(singing in foreign language) In March we filmed the "Medium," which is an opera by Menotti, who actually went to Curtis.

And we filmed it differently than we did "Mercy."

It was the first time I was ever on a real movie set.

I've done some on camera work before then, but it was really fascinating to see how that all works and to see the amount of people that are involved in making something work.

(group chattering) With the "Medium," we filmed it as if we were singing on stage so we did the acting and the singing at the same time.

So that presented different challenges for sure because we had to do multiple takes of the scene.

So I would have to sing Big Arias or Big Duets four or five times sometimes, which can be pretty taxing on the voice.

♪ How many times I told you ♪ I played Monica in the "Medium" and she is Baba's daughter.

And in the show I won't give too much away, but they put on fake (indistinct) basically to make money and to scam people.

And Monica is at the point in her life where she's transitioning into being a woman and feeling these new feelings.

And she's a very empathetic character, and even though she knows what she's doing is wrong, she really is trying to help these people that come in and want to communicate with their dead loved ones.

So she was a very interesting character to play and I got to really fill her shoes in that whole, the whole project.

I got to be her for a very long period of time.

In the past a lot of musical theater performers were also opera singers, now it's a little more separate.

But I definitely wanna get back into singing musical theater a little bit.

I think forever, musical theater and being in shows was a kind of place of freedom for me.

And sometimes in opera because it's so technical and so difficult and you have to work so hard to figure things out.

Sometimes it feels a little less free.

But I think also in my journey and as I progress, I've been finding that freedom in opera.

(congregation applauding) I feel really grateful to be able to be a singer and to pursue the arts and music.

I think to me it's the most important part of my life and I love to be able to share that part of myself with other people, and music has been able to help me and shape me in a way that I can't even really explain or comprehend.

So it's really a privilege to be able to share it with other people.

And I think opera is wonderful and I'd love to be able to get other people to love it in the way that I do, 'cause I think it's really amazing.

It gets to the fundamental aspects of what it means to be human.

And I think other music can express that as well.

(singing in foreign language) In my life I want to be able to do as much as I possibly can 'cause there's so much amazing music out there, and I really want to be a vessel for that music.

(gentle music) (singing in foreign language) (audience applauding)