PRESS RELEASE:

A dazzling array of opera’s most exciting stars will take the stage when Live From Lincoln Center returns to KUED on Thursday, December 13 agt 7:00 p.m. with the telecast of the Richard Tucker Opera Gala, one of the most highly anticipated events of the opera season at Lincoln Center, which takes place at Avery Fisher Hall. Singer/actress Audra McDonaldwill host the telecast.

This year’s Tucker Award recipient, soprano Ailyn Pérez, was born in Chicago to first-generation Mexican immigrants and is the first Hispanic singer to receive the prestigious award in its 34-year history.

The broadcast will include a feature on Pérez, as well as backstage interviews with the artists. Pérez will join baritones Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Gerald Finley, mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina, tenors Stephen Costello and Marcello Giordani, bass Ildar Abdrazakov, bass-baritone Erwin Schrott and others onstage in a program of favorite arias and ensembles, including selections by Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti, Massenet, Mascagni, Handel and Wagner. Maestro Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music Director of Houston Grand Opera, leads the lineup of luminaries, supported by members of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the New York Choral Society.

The 33-year-old Ailyn Pérez continues to gain momentum as one of America’s fastest-rising talents as she heads into a season packed with many of opera’s best-loved heroines: Puccini’s Mimì, Mozart’s Countess, Verdi’s Violetta and Donizetti’s Adina. Opera News writes: “The phrase ‘an embarrassment of riches’ might have been invented to describe the combination of talents that belong to Ailyn Pérez.”

Her husband, tenor Stephen Costello, won the Tucker Award in 2009, making the couple, who were dubbed “America’s fastest-rising husband-and-wife opera stars” by The Associated Press, the first who will have not one, but two Richard Tucker Awards on their mantelpiece.

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