(LENOX, Mass.) – The Boston Symphony Orchestra opens its 2014 Tanglewood season on Saturday, July 5, at 8:30pm in the Shed with an all-Americanprogram at Tanglewood program featuring superstar soprano Renée Fleming in an adventurous program of modern works by Copland, Barber, and John Adams, as well as a selection of Broadway show tunes by the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The first half of the concert, led by conductor William Eddins in his BSO debut, begins with two brief works by Joseph Schwantner and Aaron Copland: the former’s “Freeflight,” a 1989 Boston Pops commission, and the latter’s “Night Thoughts” from Music for a Great City. Fleming then joins the orchestra for Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and the first half concludes with John Adams’s vivacious Short Ride in a Fast Machine. After intermission, Fleming joins conductor Rob Fisher (also in his BSO debut) and the orchestra for a selection of favorites from musical theater, including songs from South Pacific, The King and I, Porgy and Bess, and The Sound of Music.

Fleming, who first performed with the BSO at Tanglewood on July 13, 1991, will be featured in Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Living on Love (written by Joe DiPietro and Garson Kanin) as a celebrated diva, along with actor Justin Long. In 2013 she released her album, Guilty Pleasures, which includes songs and arias in eight different languages and won her the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo. She also recently sang the National Anthem during the 2014 Super Bowl.

Bookending the first half of the program are two energetic, vibrant works by contemporary composers. Joseph Schwantner’s Freeflight combines the bombast and grandeur of the 20th-century American fanfare with inventive and wide-ranging instrumentation as well as periods of mystery and quietude, lending the work a musical depth uncommon in the genre. John Adams’s modern classic Short Ride in a Fast Machine similarly transcends the expectations of the fanfare, albeit through different means. Weaving together the polyrhythmic complexity of minimalism with a hurtling, inexorable sense of forward motion, Short Ride in a Fast Machine provides an orchestral thrill ride that lives up to its name.

Repurposing film music originally composed for the 1961 independent psychological thriller Something Wild, Aaron Copland created the orchestral concert suite Music for a Great City three years later in response to a commission from the London Symphony Orchestra. “Night Thoughts,” the second of four movements in the suite, is dark and cloaked in shadow as its title suggests, meandering meditatively across a dusky, abstract canvas of sound. Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which was premiered in 1948 by soprano Eleanor Steber alongside the BSO and Serge Koussevitzky, sets excerpts from James Agee’s short story Knoxville, based on the author’s childhood there. Described by the composer as a “lyric rhapsody,” the music closely matches the text, flowing tranquilly along when the text describes the pastoral charm of rural Tennessee and rising in intensity and rhythmic definition when the text turns to more urgent considerations.

The program concludes with some of America’s most beloved musical theater music, focusing on the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Gershwin brothers. Included are the Overture and “Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific;  songs from ”The Sound of Music”; “Hello, Young Lovers” from The King and I; the Overture to Girl Crazy; “Fascinating Rhythm” from Lady Be Good; and “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess.