Angel Blue

Born in Los Angeles in 1984, the Grammy-Award winning soprano Angel Blue studied at the University of California in her hometown and began her career in the Young Artists Program at the Los Angeles Opera. In 2009, she moved to Europe, where she received her first engagements at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, the Theater an der Wien, and Frankfurt Opera. Puccini’s La Bohème has played a key role in Blue’s career: she debuted as Musetta in 2007 at Los Angeles Opera and later sang the same role in her debut at La Scala in Milan. But she then switched to the role of Mimì, which she performed for the first time at English National Opera in 2014 and sang at the Vienna Staatsoper in 2016; she also appeared in that role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2017. She has taken on the part of Liù in Puccini’s Turandot at the Dresden Semperoper and sang Violetta Valéry in Verdi’s La traviata at the Royal Opera House in London. In the 2021-22 season, Angel Blue appeared as Bess in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at the Met; she sang Mimì at the Bavarian Staatsoper and made a guest appearance as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust at the Opéra national de Paris. In 2022-23 she will expand her repertoire with Verdi’s Aida, which she will perform at London’s Royal Opera House under the baton of Sir Antonio Pappano; at Los Angeles Opera she will take on Puccini’s Tosca under Oksana Lyniv, and she will also participate in a new production of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. In the concert hall, Angel Blue has worked with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle, the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin as well as Marin Alsop, the Munich Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta, and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia – Roma and Daniele Gatti, among others. Angel Blue was the first African American to receive the Metropolitan Opera’s Beverly Sills Artists Award in 2020 and the Richard Tucker Award in 2022.

August 2022