Marco Borggreve
Washington National Opera opens its season at the beleaguered Kennedy Center in late October with Aida featuring Raehann Bryce-Davis as Amneris. Verdi was one of her mainstays last season, including Amneris at London’s Royal Opera and Azucena at the Houston Grand Opera. However, the American mezzo soprano also appeared earlier this year in a European Mussorgsky double-header, as Marfa in Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, following Boris Godunov with the Dutch National Opera which is seemingly one of the few companies these days to still perform the opera’s “Polish Act.” Today’s Grand Tier Grab Bag offers Bryce-Davis in Marina’s aria from a broadcast of Boris conducted by Vasily Petrenko.
So far, however, the mezzo’s Met career has been limited to a pair of 20th century works in English: Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, in which she debuted in 2022 as Baba the Turk, and Anthony Davis’s X.
In the spring Bryce-Davis will appear with Brandon Jovanovich in an unusually interesting program by the Boston Lyric Opera: Anne Bogart stages Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in Arnold Schoenberg’s reduced orchestration. The singer also offers a recital with the BLO in the spring.
Mussorgsky: Boris Godunov, “Skuchno Marine”
Raehann Bryce-Davis
Conductor: Vasily Petrenko
Dutch National Opera
17 June 2025
Broadcast
