Sarah Brightman sings Oct. 9 at the Fox Theatre.
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Sarah Brightman was 8 years old when man first walked on the moon in July 1969. The historic event made a big impression. A very big impression, you might say.
It led her to record Dreamchaser, her 11th studio album and the reason behind the tour that’s bringing her to the Fox Theatre. And it convinced her to chase a dream of visiting space herself.
If all goes as planned, she’ll be part of a three-person crew traveling to the International Space Station sometime in 2015 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. She began cosmonaut training near Moscow a year ago.
She’ll orbit the Earth 16 times a day during the mission, expected to last about 10 days, and intends to become the first professional musician to sing from space.
For Brightman, Dreamchaser is the realization of a lifelong journey. “When I look back, my mind’s eye brings me a rush of images from all of the incredible things that I have been privileged to experience in my life,” she says. “But if I keep tracking back, my thoughts eventually come to rest on a flickering TV screen in 1969.”
Brightman felt her hopes shift that day. “Watching the first man land on the moon — it was an epiphany. It changed things. It actually helped me understand what it was that I had to do in my life, to further myself, to do things, to think outside of the box. I could go that far, I could do that.”
The classical crossover soprano is also a UNESCO Artist for Peace ambassador and plans to use her time on the space station — which requires the mindful, shared consumption of resources and a focus on sustainability — as a model for how we might better inhabit our planet.
She’ll advocate for UNESCO’s efforts to promote peace and sustainability and use the journey to promote female education and empowerment in science and technology.
Not quite what you might expect from the woman who came to fame in America as the wife of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, his inspiration for the character of Christine Daaé in the musical The Phantom of the Opera. She played the role in London and on Broadway, then leapfrogged to international stardom. She’s one of the world’s biggest-selling sopranos — noted for her three-octave range — and is credited with pioneering the classical crossover genre of music. She’s sung in theaters, arenas, cathedrals, stadiums and at Olympic ceremonies, twice. She and Lloyd Webber divorced in 1990.
“I’m an interpreter of music, and I’m proud of that,” Brightman says. “I’m able to be very free, to go in all directions — to choose music [based on] what it makes me feel within myself. That guides me to what I need to do. It comes from very deep feelings.”
Dreamchaser, her first recording in five years, is a mix of classical (Górecki, Rimsky-Korsakov) and pop (Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Venus and Mars”). All 10 songs have an otherworldly feel with swelling New Age-y orchestrations, influenced, she says, by her cosmonaut training.
“They’re connected subliminally — in the feelings of the songs and what they gave to me, which was something very uplifting, very open, very outward,” she says. “It’s what we do. We look out at the night sky and we dream and we imagine and we explore. The words ‘dream chaser’ encapsulate all of that for me.”
Now, at age 53, she’s begun what she calls “the greatest adventure I can imagine.” She likens anticipation of her space adventure to being in love. “It’s this thing that stays beside me as I’m walking down the street.”
