Performing Arts

She's shown up in Rolex ads, a beautiful woman radiating a glamorous life. And so she appears onstage, in top opera houses around the world.

But Renée Fleming, who's performing in the Dallas Opera's 50th anniversary gala concert Saturday, says she doesn't entirely connect with her glamour-diva image. And by all accounts the American soprano is the ultimate non-diva on the job and off – a sensible, grounded woman and a supportive colleague.

"I was such a wallflower as a high school student," she says, "the last person to be picked for any team. Sometimes when I see these newer photos, I still don't connect with that image. I still think that's another person.

"There used to be a style for an opera singer, a persona you created for interviews, onstage and in public. I don't have a persona in that way. As a human being, what you see is what you get," she says in a telephone interview from her New York office.

The program for the gala concert includes the Letter Scene from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, the work with which Ms. Fleming made her Dallas Opera debut in 1992. In homage to Maria Callas, the diva who inaugurated the Dallas Opera with a concert on Nov. 21, 1957, Ms. Fleming will also sing the famous "Casta diva" from Norma. Callas never sang the Bellini opera here, but the eponymous Druid priestess was one of her signature roles.

The Dallas Opera is cagey about the rest of the program, which is to be presented at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, but a great show is promised. Joining Ms. Fleming, a lifelong jazz fan, is jazz trumpeter Chris Botti. Dallas Opera music director Graeme Jenkins will conduct the company orchestra and chorus, and WFAA-TV film critic Gary Cogill will host the festivities.

Tickets for the pre-concert cocktail party and post-concert dinner and dance are sold out, but tickets for the concert are still available.

Ms. Fleming's soprano has gotten bigger and richer since her Dallas debut 15 years ago. "I was replacing Carol Vaness in a lot of Mozart repertoire she couldn't sing anymore," Ms. Fleming says of her early years. Since then, she's taken on heavier work, including title roles in La traviata, Manon and Rusalka.

Apart from the evolution of her voice and roles, Ms. Fleming created a stir about 10 years ago with a noticeable weight loss. Although never remotely heavy, she now keeps a slender figure that many women on or off an opera stage would envy.

No less than the rest of us, opera singers are under growing pressure to look good, which means at least reasonably slender and toned. The full-figured soprano of operatic cliché can still get work, but only if she has a voice that can move mountains.

"Opera has become much more image-oriented, more theatrical," Ms. Fleming says. That was a big reason she went on a regimen to lose weight.

"Actually, it was something I always wanted to do, but just couldn't find out how to do it. But once I discovered low-carb, I found it works for me.

"I also discovered Pilates a couple of years ago. As we get older, we need to stay slender."

She's also pacing herself more deliberately. This season, she just finished a run of La traviata at the Met, and in January she'll reprise the role with Lyric Opera of Chicago. Her only other staged roles in 2007-08 are Desdemona in the Met's Otello, in February and March 2008, and the Countess in a Vienna State Opera production of Capriccio in June.

Otherwise, she's singing a lot of one-off concerts, like the Dallas Opera gala, which require far less time commitment. She says she doesn't want to be like a certain tenor, who packs his schedule with both singing and conducting performances, plus running a couple of opera companies.

"This fall is great, the perfect schedule," she says. "Last season, I did too much and really wore myself out. My new T-shirt says, 'I am not Domingo,' " referring to Placido Domingo. "He thrives on that kind of frantic schedule. I don't know how he does it."

Plan your life

Dallas Opera "Bravo 50" Gala Concert, 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora. Tickets $85 to $225. 214-443-1000, www.dallasopera.org.

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