RYAN SPEEDO GREEN

Marc A. Scorca, President/CEO of OPERA America, has announced his retirement after 33 years of leadership. ...

As usual, the gala concert of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation started off with an interloper from the golden age of opera: Richard Tucker himself, singing Mascagni’s “Addio alla Madre” from CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA. A tough act to follow for those singing live at Carnegie Hall, but happily no one seemed daunted by it. That doesn’t mean everything went smoothly at the gala concert, which is par for the course of the annual event. Despite the prestige of the Richard Tucker Awards, the world doesn’...

I must admit that the Met’s current revival of IL TROVATORE--with RIGOLETTO and TRAVIATA, considered the great creations of Verdi’s middle period--made me think of another masterwork, “A Night at the Opera,” my favorite of the movies by those champions of silliness, the Marx Brothers....

It was tough separating the opera from the event when FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES opened the first post-Covid pandemic season at the Met. Back then, in September 2021, FIRE made history as the first opera by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard with his librettist Kasi Lemmons (based on the book by Charles M. Blow), to make its way to the Met stage. This week, it returned to show that contemporary opera can have “legs” on the big stage of the company....

Watch as the dancers of this season’s revival of Terence Blanchard’s hit opera rehearse the Act III step dance with co-director and choreographer Camille A. Brown....

No matter how many “star” performances the Met manages to muster in the course of a season, there’s nothing quite as exciting as the Laffont Grand Finals Concert—formerly known as the Met’s National Auditions Finals—which took place this past Sunday afternoon for its 70th season, when we got to hear up-and-comers who might have knocked our socks off at the concert itself or could at some time in the future....

The Met has announced the winners of the 2024 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition. Learn more about the winners here!...

The 19 semifinalists, who have moved past regional auditions across the United States, will compete in the semifinal round of the Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition on Monday, March 11, 2024, beginning at 10AM ET. T...

While there’s always a great deal of talk about where the next generation of operagoers is coming from, there’s much less hand-wringing about the sources of the new generation of singers. After hearing the Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition’s Grand Finals Concert at the Met on Sunday afternoon, we could plainly hear that the future of the Met roster is alive and well and waiting to take center stage....

The Met presents the winners of the 2023 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition: tenor Anthony León, mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis, soprano Teresa Perrotta, mezzo-soprano Sarah Saturnino, bass-baritone Christian Simmons, and soprano Meredith Wohlgemuth. ...

In search of new audiences, the Met has followed Terence Blanchard’s FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES with the jazz musician/composer’s first opera, CHAMPION, the story of closeted boxer Emile Griffith’s rise and fall from grace. Honestly, never have I heard people whose usual venues are Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium and Monday Night Football on ESPN talk about how they “wanted to see the new opera at the Met.”...

The Met Opera brings magic and splendor to cinemas across the country with The Met: Live in HD. ...

Award-winner Angel Blue started off the proceedings at the Richard Tucker Gala (after Barry Tucker’s usual introduction/ode to his father, the great tenor) with a bang: Puccini’s justly famous aria “Vissi d’arte” from TOSCA. For those of us who’ve only heard her as Bess in Gershwin’s PORGY & BESS at the Met, it was a revelation to hear her lush, velvety voice raise the rafters on the hall, with no warm up....

After a season-long series of competitions at the district, regional, and national levels, a panel of expert judges named six singers as the winners of the 2022 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition. ...

The winners of the 50th George London Foundation Competition for young American and Canadian opera singers were announced at the conclusion of the competition’s final round this evening, which took place at Gilder Lehrman Hall at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. While the event is usually held with in-person audience, this year’s audience was virtual. Susanna Phillips, international opera star and 2005 George London Award winner, was the livestream host. ...

There are so many things to like about the season’s revival of Gershwin’s PORGY & BESS, which was new in the 2019-2020 season, before Covid became the “song” that no one wanted to hear. PORGY on the other hand, is the music that everybody can take a liking to, with its fluid combination of opera, Broadway musical and versions of spirituals and Gullah folk music that nobody ever heard before. It has been best known for its songs, which have become “standards” in the Broadway songbook. The styli...

The Lady or the Tiger? In this case, both are Mussorgsky’s BORIS GODUNOV—just different versions of it. Which is the preferred one? (Or, more properly, “the preferred one of several,” including one that the composer’s friend, Rimsky Korsakov, fiddled with after his death.) The Met chose Mussorgsky's original, and shorter, version for its revival of the composer's most famous opera this season....

It’s been a long 18 months since the last opera on the Met’s stage. The Terence Blanchard-Kasi Lemmons FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES roared into Lincoln Center to let the audience know what it has been missing....

On Sunday afternoon, the winners of what had been the Met’s annual National Council Auditions now, the Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition (charmingly emceed by Ryan Speedo Green), were named. This year’s Fab Five were Korean soprano Hyoyoung Kim (the Birgit Nilsson Award), soprano Raven McMillon (the Faith P. Geier Award), tenor Duke Kim (the Dominique Laffont Award), mezzo Emily Treigle (the Alton E. Peters Award) and mezzo Emily Sierra (the Noreen Zimmerman Award)....

After a months-long series of competitions at the district, regional, and national levels, a panel of expert judges named five singers as the winners of the 2021 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition. ...

Following today's semifinal competition, ten singers have advanced to the final round of the Metropolitan Opera's 2021 National Council Auditions—the Grand Finals Concert, which will be streamed live on Sunday, May 16, at 3pm ET. ...

Bass baritone Ryan Speedo Green was named as a winner of the 2021 Beverly Sills Artist Award by the Metropolitan Opera. Given in honor of the famed American soprano, this annual award is given to artists of exceptional ability with rising operatic careers at the Met. ...

The Met has announced the Weeks 13 and 14 schedules for its Nightly Met Opera Streams, which feature the Met's acclaimed productions of Philip Glass's Akhnaten and Satyagraha, both available to the public for the first time on the Met's streaming platforms....

Thanks to the French online service, France.tv, opera-goers in New York have had a chance to see what lies ahead with the new production of Mozart's DON GIOVANNI by Ivo van Hove, that, health crisis be willing, will make its debut at the Met next March....

The 23 young opera singers who have won regional auditions around the United States will compete in the semifinal round of the country's leading vocal competition, the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, on Monday, February 24. The closed semifinal competition, held on the Met stage before a panel of judges, will determine the select group of finalists who will advance to the final round of the competition-the Grand Finals, which is open to the public and will be held on the Met sta...