The Metropolitan Opera wins 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Champion

New York, NY (February 5, 2024)—The Met’s recording of Terence Blanchard’s Champion won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. The opera, which had its company premiere on April 10, 2023, was Blanchard’s second opera on the Met stage. A commercial and critical success, Champion arrived at the Met after the overwhelming triumph of the 2021 production of Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones. This win marks the Met’s fourth consecutive win for Best Opera Recording, for a total of 12 wins in the category. Previous wins include Fire Shut Up in My Bones in 2023, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten in 2022, and the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess in 2021.

The recording features Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, leading a cast that includes bass-baritones Ryan Speedo Green and Eric Owens as boxer Emile Griffith at different points in his life; soprano Latonia Moore as Emile’s mother, Emelda Griffith; tenor Paul Groves as Howie Albert, Emile’s trainer; baritone Eric Greene as Emile’s boxing opponent, Benny “Kid” Paret; mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Kathy Hagen, a confidante to Emile; with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus. The recording was produced by David Frost, one of the most awarded classical producers in the history of the Grammys.

Maestro Nézet-Séguin was nominated for a Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance for Florence Price’s Symphony No. 4 and William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra.