Fleming will aim for a sophisticated audience with her program here.

For music lovers, the appearance of Renée Fleming at the Orpheum Theatre on Tuesday (December 1), for the Vancouver Recital Society, will be a major event. Many will argue that she is the most resplendent American soprano singing today, whether on the opera stage or in recital, as she’ll be doing here with pianist Gerald Martin Moore.

Not only is her golden voice burnished with overtones, she’s uncommonly beautiful, blessed with facial bone structure derived from her Slavic roots, though she was born in small-town Pennsylvania and could be an American beauty queen. And though indisputably a great diva, she hardly acts like one—rather, she redefines what it is to be one.

Aside from being a superlative singer, Fleming is an uncommonly good writer, as her 2004 book The Inner Voice proves. In our phone interview from New York, I bring up the diva business. The book has two very funny pages on that subject. I read bits of it back to her and ask if any of this could be about, oh… Kathleen Battle, maybe? She chuckles discreetly, responding: “I have my own eccentricities. I don’t like air conditioning and I love humidity.”

She might be allowed those.

The excerpt reads: “Sopranos are burdened with a stereotype that is rivaled perhaps only by librarians and mothers-in-law: we are, as a group, invariably labeled divas and prima donnas, though neither term had a negative connotation in its original usage. We are selfish, high maintenance, and hugely demanding. We drink only Swedish spring water without ice from a Lalique glass that has been chilled to exactly 67 degrees.…We have not touched our own luggage since we graduated from high school, lest we stress the trapezius….” And so on.

“Did I miss a stereotype?” she asks, sounding amused. “Trust me, I’ve heard them all, though I’ve seen little to support these images. I much more often encounter a group of generous women who are happy to share what they know.”

Her recent DVD of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, with baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky and the Metropolitan Orchestra and Chorus under Valery Gergiev, was a runaway hit. “We were both shocked by its popularity,” she says. She has nothing but praise for Hvorostovsky’s “natural ability and presence”, though my own experience of interviewing an apparently arrogant man was less than charming.

Fleming understands. “As a young singer, I was once put off by a singer I’d admired. I couldn’t listen to the music in the same way again. To this day I’m reluctant to go backstage.”

At the Orpheum, Fleming’s program will largely be made up of relatively unheard material. “I sing for a sophisticated audience,” she says. “I love doing ‘new’ music. Hopefully, this material might make people look into it a little deeper.”

Her performance will include an aria from La Bohème, but by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, not Giacomo Puccini; Olivier Messiaen’s Poèmes Pour Mi; an aria from Umberto Giordano’s little-known opera Siberia; and another from Jules Massenet’s Cléopatre.

It will notably include something written specifically for her, which she premiered in Paris last May: Henri Dutilleux’s Le Temps l’Horloge. Dutilleux, now in his 90s, is France’s preeminent composer. Fleming loves the work, pointing out its “Bill Evans–like jazz harmonies”.

And, thank goodness, there will also be five songs by Richard Strauss. Expect these to be glorious: Fleming adores Strauss. Her CD Strauss Heroines, on Decca, is one of my favourites, particularly the trio from Der Rosenkavalier, which she sings with her friends Barbara Bonney and Susan Graham.

In her liner notes to the album she talks about the experience of being inexplicably moved, sometimes to tears, when she experiences Strauss, as I am when I hear her sing the aria from his Die Agyptische Helena on her Four Last Songs CD. (Fleming has credited the great Swiss soprano Lisa Della Casa for teaching her much about singing these rapt reflections on the finality of death.)

It has to do with the synesthesia of words and music. “It’s music that either speaks to you or it doesn’t,” she says. “There’s a reason that it leaves people in tears.”