Jordan Donica to Join Isabel Leonard for Concert at Carnegie Hall

Multi-Grammy Award–winning singer Isabel Leonard has had a career that has brought her to leading opera houses and concert halls around the world. This season, she will return to her native New York, where she curates a four-concert Perspectives series, twenty years after her first appearances at Carnegie Hall.

Ms. Leonard kicks of her Perspectives on Thursday, January 15 at 8:00 p.m., when she welcomes fellow star of the Metropolitan Opera Ryan Speedo Green, and vocalist and actor Jordan Donica (Broadway’s Sunset Boulevard and Camelot, HBO’s The Gilded Age) to Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage. Joined by collaborative pianist John Arida, they will perform wide-ranging repertoire drawn from the 1930s and ’40s songbooks of Bernstein, Berlin, Porter, Rodgers, Price, Copland, Weill, and more.

On Wednesday, February 4 at 8:00 p.m., she returns to Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Met Orchestra as soloist in Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from the iconic musical West Side Story as part of Carnegie Hall’s citywide festival United in Sound: America at 250.

Ms. Leonard appears alongside fellow Carnegie Hall Artist Trustees on Tuesday, May 5 at 7:00 p.m. for a spectacular gala performance to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Carnegie Hall’s “Concert of the Century.” The evening, to be conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin will also include performances by Emanuel Ax, Joyce DiDonato, Michael Feinstein, Renée Fleming, Evgeny Kissin, Lang Lang, Audra McDonald, and Daniil Trifonov with the NYO-USA All-Stars and Oratorio Society of New York. This historic concert will be heard by listeners around the world as part of the Carnegie Hall Live broadcast and digital series. Produced by WQXR and Carnegie Hall, and co-hosted by WQXR’s Jeff Spurgeon and WNYC’s John Schaefer, the concert will be broadcast on WQXR 105.9 FM in New York and streamed online at wqxr.org and carnegiehall.org/wqxr.

The final event of her Perspectives series on Tuesday, June 9 at 7:30 p.m. will be An Evening with Isabel Leonard and Friends, a multifaceted program that incorporates Spanish song, opera, and dance. This Zankel Hall performance will include re-imaginings of some of Ms. Leonard’s most celebrated roles, choreography by flamenco dancer Sonia Olla, music performed by flamenco singer Ismael Fernández, and more.

About Isabel Leonard

Since making her 2007 debut as Stéphano in Roméo et Juliette, Isabel Leonard has remained one of the Metropolitan Opera’s most treasured artists. She was the 2011 recipient of the Beverly Sills Artist Award, established by Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman, and has appeared with the company in more than 150 performances, including as the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, the title roles of Cinderella, Carmen, and Nico Muhly’s Marnie, Blanche de la Force in Dialogues des Carmélites, Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Charlotte in Werther, Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Dorabella in Così fan tutte, and Miranda in Thomas Adès’s The Tempest. She has also appeared in seven of the company’s Live in HD cinema transmissions.

Additional recent performance highlights include an appearance as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni and Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia at LA Opera; the title role in Songbird, an adaptation of Offenbach’s La Périchole, at Washington National Opera; Maria in The Sound of Music at Houston Grand Opera; and the title role of La Cenerentola at the Bavarian State Opera.

A three-time Grammy Award winner (of five nominations) and recipient of the 2013 Richard Tucker Award, she has also appeared at La Scala, Dutch National Opera, Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Paris Opera, Salzburg Festival, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Glyndebourne Festival, Opera Philadelphia, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. She starred as Ada Monroe in the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain at the Santa Fe Opera in 2015. On the concert stage, she has performed with The Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony, among others. Ms. Leonard currently serves as an Artist Trustee on Carnegie Hall’s Board of Trustees.