FULL CHAMPION (Blanchard) Met New York 2023 Ryan Speedo Green, Latonia Moore, Eric Owens, Stephanie Blythe
Popular Singers in this Opera Recording
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Champion
- Composer: Blanchard Terence
- Libretto: Michael Cristofer Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, New York City
- Recorded: April 29, 2023
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Ryan Speedo Green, Latonia Moore, Eric Owens, Stephanie Blythe, Meredith Arwady, Paul Groves, Eric Greene
- Conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin
- Orchestra: Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
- Choreographer: Camille A. Brown
- Stage Director: James Robinson
- Stage Designer: Allen Moyer
- Costume Designer: Montana Levi Blanco
- Lighting Designer: Donald Holder
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Met HD in Cinema
- Date Published: 2023
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs
- Video Recording from: vk FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Quote from Metropolitan Opera:
Champion was the first opera composed by Terence Blanchard—following numerous high-profile film scores and many years as a leading jazz artist—and depicts the conflicts and crises in the life of boxer Emile Griffith. When Blanchard was initially approached to write an opera, this subject emerged as the story that he felt most inspired to set to music. He saw the truly operatic dimensions in the confluence of love, violence, death, and forgiveness, and in bringing them to the stage, he wove together both contemporary and classical musical idioms to create a wholly new sound world, one that he characterizes as “opera in jazz.”
The opera opens in a nursing home in Hempstead, Long Island, in the early 21st century but unfolds largely through extended regressions to important times and places in Griffith’s life: St. Thomas in 1957, New York City from the 1950s to the 1990s, and flashbacks to moments in his international boxing career—from Las Vegas to Paris to Buenos Aires and beyond—in the 1960s.