All shall have prizes: Met names $50k Beverly Sills winner
OperaThe Beverly Sills Artist Award 2024 has gone to Leah Hawkins, a graduate of the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program.
Last season she sang the principal role of Louise/Betty in the Met premiere of Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.
She’s a bit more than a graduate. She has sung lead roles in Cilèa’s Adriana Lecouvreur, Dvořák’s Rusalka, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Puccini’s, La bohème, Tosca and Il tabarro, and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos: no small accomplishment. It should be pointed out that she’s a soprano. She has taken the solos in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and the Verdi Requiem. In addition to Davis’s Malcolm X (1985) among recent works, she also sang in Blanchard’s 2019 “opera in jazz” Fire Shut Up in My Bones.
Born in Philadelphia.
Congratulations to Ms. Hawkins.
Leah Hawkins and Mary Elizabeth Williams are two of the finest black sopranos today.
We should all be grateful to the late maestro James Levine for the Lindemann young artists program.
Congrats!