The Metropolitan Opera wins 2023 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones

• Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin also wins for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album

        New York, NY (February 6, 2023)—The Metropolitan Opera last night won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the third year in a row it triumphed in that category.

        The Met received three other nominations this year: for Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice, for Best Opera Recording; Verdi’s Requiem: The Met Remembers 9/11, for Best Choral Performance; and A Concert for Ukraine, for Best Classical Compendium. Rarely has a single opera company garnered four Grammy nominations in the same year. The Met won Best Opera Recording in 2022 for Philip Glass’s Akhnaten and in 2021 for the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.

        Fire Shut Up in My Bones opened the Met’s 2021–22 season and made history as the first opera by a Black composer to be presented on the Met stage. It also marked the return of live opera at the Met following an extended closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The win marks the seventh Grammy for the celebrated jazz composer and trumpeter.

        The October 23, 2021, recording features Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, leading a cast that features baritone Will Liverman as Charles; soprano Latonia Moore as his mother, Billie; soprano Angel Blue as the forces of Destiny and Loneliness, as well as Charles’s college sweetheart, Greta; and Walter Russell III as Charles’s childhood self, Char’es-Baby. Blanchard’s opera Champion will have its Met premiere on April 10.

        Maestro Nézet-Séguin was also honored with a Grammy for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, along with soprano Renée Fleming, for Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, on which he performed as pianist.