WHEN you walk to your seat in a movie theater for one of the ''Live in HD'' broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, your experience begins with the sound: the instantly recognizable, immediately comforting hum of instruments tuning and the audience stirring, piped in live from the Met itself. I heard it when I stepped into the Murdock Theater in...
Not quite two years ago the soprano Renée Fleming released an album that constituted the biggest surprise of a noteworthy career: ''Dark Hope,'' a collection of rock songs in plush arrangements, came out on Decca in June 2010. Most of the indie-rock acts represented on the disc, like Arcade Fire and the Mars Volta, were urged upon her by Q Prime,...
DURING a stretch of several months in 2010 the soprano Renée Fleming made what looked to be some startling shifts in her lustrous career. First, that spring, she released an indie-rock recording, ''Dark Hope.'' This was no mere crossover project, she insisted, but an attempt to visit a ''parallel universe'' of pop music, as she put it in the...