Mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves is retiring from the stage after a last performance as Maria in the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess at the Metropolitan Opera, and looking ahead to directing and mentoring.

The very first time mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe ever sang in an opera, she was a 17-year-old college freshman at Potsdam State University in New York. The opera was Giacomo Puccini’s “Gianni ...

Decca Classics is thrilled to announce the exclusive signing of the mezzo-soprano, Aigul Akhmetshina. Her journey from an isolated village in rural Bashkortostan in the Ural Mountains to the world's ...

Plus, get the best of BroadwayWorld delivered to your inbox, and unlimited access to our editorial content across the globe. In honor of that landmark 80th-anniversary production of the second Rodgers ...

Inspiration can come from anywhere. For Martile Rowland, it hit as she flipped through channels on the TV and landed on a wrestling match. “I’d never watched wrestling before. It was very operatic and ...

Symone Harcum was a graduate student when she met the mezzo-soprano, who guided her through a field that has traditionally overlooked Black women. From top: Denyce Graves, 59, mezzo-soprano opera ...

In the classical music world, there’s a long tradition of celebrating New Year’s Eve with performances of Viennese waltzes, choruses of “Auld Lang Syne” and sips of sparkling Champagne. Berlin-based ...

Did you know that, in 1961, years before the passing of the Civil Rights Act, President John F. Kennedy appointed a Black woman from Madison, North Carolina to the National Music Committee? Many ...

For the mezzo-soprano opera singer Nina Yoshida Nelsen, a reckoning has been long overdue. Following the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, Nelsen, a fourth-generation Japanese American, had a moment ...

NEW YORK — Grace Bumbry, a pioneering mezzo-soprano who became the first Black singer to perform at Germany’s Bayreuth Festival during a career of more than three decades on the world’s top stages, ...

Grace Bumbry has died. She had one of the most illustrious operatic careers of the 20th century. She was also the first Black singer to perform at the Paris Opera and the Bayreuth Festival in Germany.