On a latest snowy afternoon, the soprano Angel Blue travelled from the Metropolitan Opera Home to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, to go to its Egyptian assortment. Blue, who’s forty, is statuesque and warmly serene, and he or she seemed elegant in an overcoat, a glittery sweater, and boots. “I simply obtained out of rehearsal,” she instructed a companion, in an elevator. “I attempted to take off some make-up, however—” An aged museumgoer wheeled round. “Are you in a present?” she requested. Sure, Blue mentioned—“Aida,” on the Met Opera. Her companion added that Blue was starring in it. The museumgoer’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow!” she mentioned. “Congratulations.” Blue demurred, balking at “star.” “Properly, it’s the title character,” she mentioned. Later, she mentioned, “Due to how Aida is as an individual, she will’t put herself on the middle of something. I like her for that—she and I share that.”
The Met’s new manufacturing of “Aida,” which runs by Might, is directed by Michael Mayer and options projections that evoke historical Egypt, dancing that means hieroglyphics, and a story body involving archeologists. Blue, who has lived in London and carried out everywhere in the world, has sung many nice roles on the Met Opera—Violetta, Mimì, Micaëla, Bess—however this season marks her début there as Aida, and that afternoon marked her début go to to the Met Museum. First, she checked out a brand new exhibit, “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Historic Egypt, 1876-Now,” which highlights works that take historical Egypt as a supply of latest inspiration. Passing an array of Nefertiti heads, Blue stopped in entrance of a wall of album covers adorned with pharaohiana, by musicians starting from Fela Kuti to Earth, Wind & Fireplace to De La Soul. Within the center: Leontyne Value in “Aida.” “I had this recording,” Blue mentioned.
Blue, who lives in New Jersey along with her husband and stepson, grew up in California, listening to standard music, classical, gospel, “all the pieces.” “I imply, good grief. My dad listened to Deep Purple, the Ink Spots, Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra,” she mentioned. “He had a very good musical palate.” Her mom, too: Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Cher. “My dad was a pastor, so I discovered about historical Egypt from the Bible—Exodus and Deuteronomy, mainly,” she mentioned. “I’ve discovered rather a lot being in ‘Aida.’ ” She cocked her head, alert to music in an adjoining room. “ ‘The Wiz!’ ” she mentioned, singing just a little. “Ba-ba-ba—the Emerald Metropolis scene.” She popped right into a multiscreen alcove, admiring clips together with Michael Jackson’s video “Keep in mind the Time,” starring Eddie Murphy and Iman as a pharaoh and his bored spouse. “Iman got here to our opening of ‘Porgy and Bess’ in 2019,” Blue mentioned. “She was actually candy.”
Blue headed downstairs to the Egyptian assortment and talked about her youth. When she was 4, she noticed “Turandot” along with her mother and father; afterward, she mentioned, “I need to be like the girl within the gentle.” By fifth grade, “I wished to be Leontyne Value.” At fifteen, she enrolled in a performing-arts highschool in Los Angeles, commuting two hours every manner and learning alongside classmates together with Josh Groban and Taran Killam. “It’s humorous—every time I’ve a second of ‘I’m not going to do that anymore,’ I see somebody from highschool on a billboard.” Throughout a low second circa “La Bohème,” she mentioned, “I turned on ‘S.N.L.’ and I noticed Taran Killam. I used to be, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I gotta hold going.’ ”
By the Temple of Dendur, atrium home windows showcased a deep-blue late-afternoon sky. “The temple was given to us in 1965—I didn’t know that till, like, two days in the past,” Blue mentioned. “That’s fascinating. Leontyne Value made her Met début in ’61, and just a little later was her enormous success with ‘Aida.’ ” Within the Tomb of Perneb, she took within the rows of hieroglyphs, and talked about Aida and Radamès, who spend the tip of Act IV, after which eternity, in a tomb. “It’s, like, ‘That is our house now,’ ” she mentioned. In a gallery, she bent to admire the Mummy of Artemidora, mendacity peacefully in a glass case. Blue’s father died eighteen years in the past. “I don’t imply to be morbid, however I keep in mind taking a look at him in his casket,” she mentioned. “He had a go well with on. He seemed very peaceable, and he had just a little smile. Regardless of the paradise was that he was experiencing, I felt like I obtained to expertise just a bit little bit of it, to see him like that.”
Her vocal expertise is “a magical factor,” Blue mentioned. “And it’s nice to have it. However I didn’t give it to myself, you understand? I’m borrowing it whereas I’m right here.” She laughed apologetically, then went on. “And after I get there it’s going to sound even higher. My dream is to sing in a choir in Heaven. If I may sing in a choir subsequent to angels—seraphim, cherubim, streets of gold, and all that—that’s the place it’s at for me.” Being named Angel, briefly, is simply advantageous. “My dad named me, and I’m grateful,” she mentioned. “My mother wished to call me Tiffany.” ♦
