Reginald Smith News

Hosted by four-time Grammy Award winner and renowned soprano Renée Fleming with Emmy and Grammy Award winner Chris Jackson, UNITED IN SONG premieres on New Year’s Eve on PBS. See who is performing, how to watch, and more!

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.

It's the most wonderful time of year at Dallas Symphony Orchestra! The DSO will deck the halls of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center this month with garlands, bows, wreaths, and Christmas trees to prepare for DSO's holiday concerts.

The American Pops Orchestra (APO) presents the semi-final round of its 6th Annual NextGen National Competition: Finding the Voices of Tomorrow. Out of hundreds of auditions coming from 103 colleges and 34 different states, 30 talented college students were chosen to compete in the semifinals!

The Cincinnati May Festival has announced complete details for  its 150th anniversary in 2023, including programs and featured soloists for performances in April and  May 2023 and local artist and ensemble participants for its 25 for 25: A New Time for Choral Music commissioning project. 

Internationally acclaimed American soprano Renée Fleming (1990 Richard Tucker Award Winner) and Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel will join the Richard Tucker Music Foundation for its 2022 Gala on Sunday, November 13, 2022 at 6:30pm at the new David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. This will mark Terfel’s first return to U.S. stages after a number of years performing primarily in Europe.

On October 28, 2022, Houston Grand Opera (HGO) will open a must-see new production of Dame Ethel Smyth's epic 1906 opera The Wreckers. This will be the first-ever full-scale production of The Wreckers from a major American opera company.

Houston Grand Opera's mainstage 2022–23 season has something for everyone and is comprised of 46 performances across seven productions.

Cincinnati Opera concludes its 2022 Summer Festival July 21-31 with two powerful opera productions and one star-studded concert event.

On June 25, opera soprano Angela Brown received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from The Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts (CAAPA)

On June 25, opera soprano Angela Brown received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from The Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts (CAAPA) for her impactful career and personal commitment to diversity in role models, performers, educators, and audiences in the arts.

Continuing its mission to bring opera to every ZIP code of the city, Opera Memphis will present its 2022-23 season in venues and public spaces across Memphis and Shelby County.

In anticipation of its world premiere this July at Cincinnati Opera, former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and composer Gregory Spears (Fellow Travelers) will discuss their new opera Castor and Patience in a free performance preview event at the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium, 101 Independence Avenue SE, Washington DC, on Thursday, May 12 at 7 pm.

Houston Grand Opera has announced its 2022–23 season, featuring a new production of Dame Ethel Smyth's rarely-performed masterpiece The Wreckers, the triumphant return of HGO-commissioned mariachi opera El Milagro del Recuerdo, the U.S. premieres of Opéra National de Paris and Royal Opera House's production of Werther and the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía of Valencia's production of Salome, and beloved HGO classics La traviata, The Marriage of Figaro, and Tosca.

I admire the plucky inventiveness of the San Diego Opera. On an annual budget of roughly three percent of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, it has managed to mount a consistently appealing and entertaining variety of productions, traditional and contemporary, in both good times and plague times. The latter even forcing an excellent performance of a much-edited La bohème in a hockey-rink parking lot with an audience seated in an armada of vehicles. But although it was an enjoyable performance over all, now and then I was glad to be wearing a California-mandated mask so that no one would know I was at the current Civic Center staging of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.

San Diego Opera presents Mozart's Così fan tutte at the Civic Theatre in downtown San Diego, February 12-20, 2022.

Originally commissioned for Cincinnati Opera's 100th anniversary in 2020 and postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Castor and Patience receives its much-anticipated world premiere in July 2022.

Cincinnati Opera today shared updated cast, production, and schedule details for its 2022 Summer Festival, which will take place June 18 through July 31, 2022. After two seasons away, the company returns this summer to its longtime performance venues, Cincinnati Music Hall and the School for Creative and Performing Arts (SCPA).

'I'm just Reggie from Atlanta' baritone Reginald Smith, Jr. explained during our hour-long discussion on Zoom. That may be how he would like to view himself, but it's hardly how most others do since he's also a Grammy winning opera star who's performed at the Met. Until high school, neither opera, much less the Met were in his plans. Then when 13 he saw an Atlanta Opera production of Tosca. 'A classical voice was not new to me.' But the spectacle of unamplified voices together with theatrical staging, an orchestra, and eye-catching scenery was a revelation. 'I vividly remember the show going along, the tenor comes out, the soprano. But when Scarpia made his first big entrance, I thought Whoa, that's a different voice. It just went, boom, you know, like, like an arrow right into my heart. And I thought, what is this person?'

Mozart's opera, Così fan tutte, opens on Saturday February 12, 2022 for four performances at the San Diego Civic Theatre. Additional performances are February 15, 18, and 20 (matinee), 2022. These performances mark the Company's safe return to the Civic Theatre since February of 2020 and the first time Così fan tutte has been presented by the Company since 2005 in a new production directed by “opera provocateur” Timothy Nelson.