Ailyn Pérez didn’t have a chance to see the posters in New York: The Metropolitan Opera (aka Met) ads for next season feature a portrait of her dressed in spectral white, with her eyes closed as she kicks her in the face Facing butterfly.
Pérez had been busy attending the San Francisco Opera’s anniversary concert, then rushed to Munich to play Desdemona in Verdi’s Othello, then flown to Santa Fe to star in Dvorak’s Rusalka. Outdoors in New Mexico, Perez found no butterflies, but he did swallow an insect.
“I started coughing,” Pérez, 44, laughed during an interview at the Santa Fe Opera facility last month. “But this is my third opera here, and I’ve learned that you have to deal with the elements.”
Her friends sent her photos of the ads in New York, something new for her. She has performed at the Metropolitan Opera since 2015 and has developed into a soprano of lush vocal beauty, dramatic sharpness and impressive presence. However, no new production was designed around it until this season, when Daniel Catán’s “Florence in the Amazon” premiered at the company.
“I didn’t post any of the photos because I don’t want something to be posted and then it disappear,” Perez said. “But when I look at her I just think, ‘Wow, I’ve always wanted that,’ and I didn’t know what would happen to that character. It leaves me speechless.”
Pérez is excited not only about the career milestone, but also about what Florence in the Amazon means to the Met. Catán’s 1996 opera — a story inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s play about a diva’s return to her homeland, premiering Nov. 16 — is part of a wave of contemporary works entering the Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire were recorded. Most notably, it is the company’s first Spanish-language show. And her heart belongs to Pérez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants.
Ushering in this era in the Met’s history is “a great honor,” he said. But for her colleagues, especially Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the ensemble’s musical director who conducts “Florence in the Amazon,” this moment is well-deserved for one of the house’s leading sopranos.
“We have known each other for a decade, at the Salzburg Festival,” said Nézet-Séguin about his relationship with Pérez. “And we make music together regularly. The generosity of his personality is evident in every vocal performance he offers. The delicacy, the quality of the voice, the generosity of the heart, all of this makes her extraordinary.”
Pérez grew up in Chicago, where his parents, both from cities near Guadalajara, Mexico, met. He went to school on the South Side but moved to the suburb of Elk Grove Village at the age of six. There he made it a point to speak English in the classroom, even though Spanish was the standard language at home.
“It was a time when if you spoke Spanish, you had ESL classes, which was certainly the system’s way of showing your attention,” Pérez said, referring to the English acronym for “English as.” Second Language” and He added: “But it has also prevented one group of students from learning with everyone else.”
It was difficult to make friends. Her homemade sandwiches contained jalapeno and avocado, which Perez said was not suitable for lunch. In addition, he looked different from the other children.
But Elk Grove Elementary School was the first place he took music lessons. The teacher was humorous and taught rhythm and tempo with a wink and fart noises. “This is supposed to be fun,” Perez recalled. He rented a recorder and then began playing cello to join the orchestra and flute to play in the band.
In high school, he began taking singing lessons as they were mandatory for participating in a musical. In his first lesson, the teacher gave him a sheet of music and asked him to sing. Through her experience with the flute, Perez felt confident breathing and being able to read the score. “The teacher looked at me as if to say, ‘Who are you?'” Pérez remembers. He knew nothing about opera, but could easily sing Puccini’s famous aria “O mio babbino caro”.
Eventually she was able to appear in musicals – as Sarah in Them and Them and as Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes – but her interest quickly focused on opera. Pérez searched the library for CDs and reviewed classical recordings by Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Mirella Freni and Montserrat Caballé. She brought her teacher a recording of La Traviata and asked why the music made her cry.
He admired Renée Fleming, whom he met after a concert in Chicago. The great soprano told her that she had “very pretty cheekbones,” to which she replied, “My God, thank you!” But most importantly, this concert was the moment, said Pérez, when he “saw someone doing the way he sings.”
Pérez had never been to an opera. That only happened when he saw Gounod’s “Faust,” starring then-student Lawrence Brownlee, at Indiana University Bloomington. He studied there because, he was told, there were Met singers on campus. Her teachers included sopranos Martina Arroyo and Virginia Zeani, who originated the role of Blanche in Poulenc’s Dialogues of Carmelites, which Pérez later performed at the Met.
Pérez continued his studies at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, graduating in 2006. Two years later he appeared in Salzburg alongside the tenor Rolando Villazón under the direction of Nézet-Séguin in Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. After this prestigious debut, several years passed until she came to the Metropolitan Opera in 2015, where she played Micaela in a revival of Carmen.
“A confident, direct presence in a role that could easily be diluted into a reserved role, Pérez offers a penetrating and decisive voice,” wrote Zachary Woolfe of that evening in the New York Times. “His tone may not be lush, but it is clear and distinct, and he uses it with intelligence and purpose.”
Today, one can hardly blame Pérez for not having a magnificent voice. Her sound was enriched but still remained flexible enough for a spinto vocal repertoire that includes both lyrical and dramatic roles; One night she can awe as the Countess of Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro and the next as the doomed nymph of Rusalka.
Her career at the Metropolitan Opera is representative of this range, in part because she is one of the favorite artists of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general director. “Every season it’s grown, it’s evolved and, frankly, it hasn’t stopped getting better,” he said. “She fits the characters she plays very convincingly, but most of all her voice is absolutely beautiful.”
In spring 2020, Pérez was scheduled to sing in Simón Boccanegra at the Metropolitan Opera, but the season was interrupted by the pandemic. “The shutdown really hit me,” he said. However, it helped a lot that I had already met Soloman Howard by then.
They were introduced in Santa Fe. In 2016, Pérez played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and her costars included Howard, a bass-baritone, as the Duke of Verona. “It left me breathless,” Pérez said. “He is such a brilliant artist and facilitator. Whether speaking or singing, presence brings something that attracts people but also conveys great power. “I knew his calling in life would be great.”
However, they only started dating in 2019. They attended the Vienna Opera Ball together and traveled to see each other sing. When the pandemic broke out, they fled to Chicago together. While she felt depressed, he was resourceful. Howard set up the equipment for the two of them to begin recording music at home.
At one point, the Santa Fe Opera asked Pérez to record himself singing Rusalka’s “Song to the Moon,” and Howard said, “Let’s make a video,” Pérez recalls. “He cut stars out of aluminum foil and attached them to the curtains. He bought a stone from a local home goods store. I was like the little mermaid on the rock and he did all that.”
When live opera resumed, Pérez opened the Met Auditorium as soprano soloist of Verdi’s Requiem to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Pérez doesn’t really remember that night – “I was out of my body” – but others do. Gelb, who said, “You can’t fake Verdi,” recalled that Pérez sounded “absolutely great.” Nézet-Séguin called it “a historical presentation.”
Howard, Pérez says, gave him cause for hope in the months leading up to this requiem. He refers to it as “my life.” In the world of opera, they’re something of a power couple, popular and hard to ignore with their red carpet-ready style. (“It’s all because of Soloman”). Days after Rusalka premiered in Santa Fe, they married.
The ceremony was small and private. A larger celebration is planned to be planned in the gaps between two tour runs, which will soon bring Pérez back to the Met for Florence in the Amazon rehearsals.
It’s an opera that Gelb has long wanted to perform in the theater; He said he was just waiting for the right star. And he knew his bet on Pérez had paid off last season when, during the “Dialogues of Carmelites” season, he asked him to sing the final aria of “Florence in the Amazon” for the Met board with just a day’s notice . Pérez sang, Gelb added, “with such beauty and conviction that she had virtually the entire board enthralled by her.”
In “Santa Fe,” Pérez spoke about the role with the depth of a literary thinker, but acknowledged that she would have to wait to see what director Mary Zimmerman came up with for the production. At least she is confident in the confidence that brings her to Florencia in the Amazon, a product of the years before this moment.
“I don’t feel like a beginner anymore,” Pérez said. “I don’t wonder what will happen next. “Now I can really look back and see everything.”