A Prairie Home Companion: December 20, 2003

Special Guests
Saturday, December 20, 2003

Born to voice teacher parents in Pennsylvania, Renée Fleming says she came by singing "very honestly and easily." As a toddler, she was exposed to singing before she could even talk by sitting next to her mother as she gave voice lessons. From 1983 to 1987, she was enrolled in the American Opera Center at Julliard, where she met Beverley Johnson, the voice teacher with whom she would continue to study throughout her career. In 1986, Ms. Fleming made her professional opera debut in Die Entüfhrung aus dem Serail in Salzburg. In 1988, she was invited to sing the Countess at the Houston Grand Opera; the following year she made her first appearances with the New York City Opera and Covent Garden. In 1998, The Beautiful Voice (Polygram), a collection of Renée Fleming's favorite songs and arias, was released and received that year's prize from L'Academie du Disque Lyrique as well as the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance. In 2002 she released Bel Canto, a collection of works by Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini.

Emanuel Ax was born in Lvov, Poland, and began studying piano in Warsaw at age six. After his family moved to Winnipeg in 1961, he continued his studies at the Julliard School under Mieczyslaw Munz. He first won the attention of the classical world in 1974, when he took the top prize in the first Arthur Rubenstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv at the age of twenty-five. He won the Michaels Award of Young Concert Artists the following year, and the Avery Fisher Prize in 1979. He has been busy performing ever since, in recital and orchestral concerts. Mr. Ax performs regularly in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, and makes regular festival appearances at Aspen, Blossom, the Hollywood Bowl, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, and Tanglewood. He is also a member of a quartet that features Jaime Laredo, Isaac Stern, and Yo-Yo Ma. Mr. Ax records exclusively with Sony Classical and is nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without Orchestra) for Haydn: Piano Sonatas Nos. 29, 31, 34, 35 & 49.

The Hopeful Gospel Quartet was formed when four friends discovered their shared interest in gospel music; they were standing around backstage, waiting for one of the Prairie Home Companion shows to begin, and one of them began to sing. The others joined in, and since then the Hopeful Gospel Quartet, or the Hopefuls, have toured with chet Atkins and performed at Carnegie Hall, Radio City, the Universal Amphitheatre, and at the great Prairie Home Hymn-Singing Festival in Moorhead, Minnesota. The Hopefuls have released two albums entitled Garrison Keillor & the Hopeful Gospel Quartet, and their most recent, Climbing Up n the Rough Side. The current members of the Hopeful Gospel Quartet are Mollie O'Brien, Garrison Keillor, and Robin and Linda Williams.

Fred Hersch is one of the foremost jazz artists working today. As a pianist, he has released twenty albums as a solo artist or bandleader, twenty more as a co-leader, and has appeared on over eighty additional recordings as either a sideman or featured soloist. In 2003, he was awarded a 2003 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship as a composer. He has given solo piano concerts at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and at Jazz Festivals in Montreal, San Francisco, Rome, and London. In 2001 he released Songs Without Words, a three-CD set of mostly solo piano recordings on Nonesuch Records. Mr. Hersch has since 1986 been the leader of the Fred Hersch Trio, whose most recent release is The Fred Hersch Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard.