#Newsflash | Met Opera Sings to Queens on June 28
BY QEDC It's In Queens
Sopranos are heading to Queens.
Socrates Sculpture Park hosts Metropolitan Opera Summer Stage on Wednesday, June 28, at 7 pm.
Met assistant conductor Juan José Lázaro, a member of the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, will play the accompanying piano with such rising stars as YADP graduate Erika Baikoff, a soprano who recently appeared as Barbarina in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Tebaldo in Giuseppi Verdi’s Don Carlo.
Other performers include current YADP artist Cierra Byrd, a mezzo-soprano who sang Bertha in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, and Thomas Glass, a baritone who won the 2019 Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition and sang Prince Yamadori in Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly during the 2021-22 season.
Admission is free. The show will take place on an outdoor stage with the crowd invited to sit on the nearby grass. (Bring blankets!) Of course, the East River, Roosevelt Island, Manhattan, and Astoria will be in the background.
While there, check out Mary Mattingly: Ebb of a Spring Tide (below), which is at Socrates Park until Sept. 9. The work’s centerpiece is a 65-foot Water Clock with edible vegetation. Fabricated on site, the mammoth structure responds to the tides brought on by the lunar cycle. (The East River is not actually a river. It’s a brackish tidal estuary with daily highs and lows…and while we’re at it, it’s to the WEST of Queens.)
Located at 32-01 Vernon Blvd., Socrates Park is open every day of the year from 9 am to Sunset.
Metropolitan Opera Summer Stage is part of Capital One City Parks Foundation SummerStage. It received funds from the Elizabeth B. McGraw Foundation, in honor of Mrs. McGraw, and public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and in collaboration with NYC Parks.
Images: Socrates Sculpture Park