You may not know opera, but you know Denyce Graves. The mezzo-soprano sang at the Washington National Cathedral during the memorial service for the victims of 9/11. She sang at the U.S. Capitol for George W. Bush’s second inauguration and for former Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as her body lay in state. She has sung the sultry title role of Georges Bizet’s Carmen countless times in nearly all the world’s biggest opera houses, and, once, she sang its most famous song, the “Habanera,” to Elmo on “Sesame Street.”
Now, incredibly, she’ll sing in Burlington, just months after she announced her retirement. Graves will give a solo recital with her pianist, William Barto Jones, at the First Congregational Church this Sunday, April 26. The program honors the country’s 250th birthday with songs by quintessentially American composers such as George Gershwin, Stephen Foster, Harry Burleigh and Carrie Jacobs-Bond.
The person responsible for this coup is Patrick Brown, a Burlington resident originally from Jamaica who directs the Greater Burlington Multicultural Resource Center. The unassuming self-described impresario is behind the Vermont appearances of many renowned people of color, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, attorney and educator Anita Hill, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson and, more recently, James Perkins, Jr., the first Black mayor of Selma, Ala., who spoke at Burlington’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in 2025. Brown regularly convinces accomplished Black singers to fly from all over the U.S. to sing in his annual “New Year’s Eve at the Opera” concerts and other performances.
Brown organized Graves’ concert as a fundraiser for New Market Kindergarten and Preparatory School, located in his home parish in Jamaica, which lost its roof last fall in Hurricane Melissa.
Vermont Symphony Orchestra executive director Elise Brunelle, who is helping to spread the word about the only lately confirmed concert, marveled at Graves’ upcoming appearance.
“She’s huge. She has the most expressive mezzo-soprano voice, and her meteoric rise as an opera singer in the states is […] phenomenal,” Brunelle said of Graves, who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C., before training at Oberlin College Conservatory and the New England Conservatory of Music and ascending to opera stardom.
VSO board member Marc Scorca, a resident of New York City and East Poultney, was less surprised. Scorca has known Graves personally for 35 years — as long as his tenure as president and CEO of the New York nonprofit Opera America. Scorca retired from that job last year, which was also when Graves announced her own retirement.
“Denyce has always been seen as a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice and a great stage presence,” Scorca said, but she also “has a generosity of spirit that is just exemplary. Some singers imagine themselves above the rigors of getting to remote places. As glamorous as she is, she is truly down to earth.”
Graves, who lives in New York City and Baltimore, recently spoke with Seven Days by phone from her New York home while packing boxes for a move.
You wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times explaining why you were retiring after 40 years of singing around the world, including 30 on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. What does your retirement look like?
I’m still busy; I’ve just sort of started a new chapter. At home, we do it in quotation marks: “Now that you’re ‘retired…’” I’m just retired from singing opera, really, which requires a lot of time away and a lot from the body and the mind.
I’m doing a lot of stage direction. I just finished directing [Scott Joplin’s] Treemonisha [at Washington National Opera], and I’m doing two Carmens back-to-back at North Carolina Opera and Opera San José. I’m still teaching at Juilliard [in New York City] and Peabody [Institute at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore]. And I’m running the Denyce Graves Foundation.
You were seen as a unicorn by your family, who didn’t quite know what opera was, and then by the opera world, which couldn’t quite see you in certain roles.
Growing up in the church [with a father who was a minister], music and singing were a rich component. So music was in our house. The decision and interest in classical music came to them out of left field. It was met with silence and some giggles and “Where’d you get that from?” My mom said to me, when I was in college, “I know you like singing, but what are you going to do with your life? Are you going to teach?”
It wasn’t until my Met Opera debut that she understood the cost of what it takes to get from A to Z. My mother got buses and brought everyone from the church.
People [in opera] didn’t know what category I belonged in, how I would be marketable. I built a name in the industry with opera’s great seductresses [Carmen and the title role in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah], but the first things I really enjoyed doing were early music, new music, and comedic things like Baba the Turk [in Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress] and Dorabella [in Mozart’s Così fan tutte]. When I first did Carmen, I said to my agent, “You know, I can do other things.”
People didn’t know what category I belonged in, how I would be marketable.
Denyce Graves
You’re so connected with the next generation of Black singers through teaching and the Denyce Graves Foundation program Shared Voices, which connects promising singers at historically Black colleges and universities with top conservatories. Who are some of the next big names to look out for?
There are so many — Christine Lyons, Taylor-Alexis DuPont, Hannah Jones are some. Kevin Short, Robert McFerrin, Leontyne Price all started at HBCUs. We build on that tradition. It’s a very expensive program. It was agonizing this year; we had to turn down so many.
You’ve performed in or directed a number of new operas, including Terence Blanchard’s Champion, Kevin Puts’ The Hours, Damien Geter’s Loving v. Virginia and Nico Muhly’s Marnie. Can you think of a story that has yet to be turned into an opera but should be?
I get requests all the time because our Hidden Voices program [the foundation’s educational arm highlighting under-recognized singers of color in American history] is about creating works of art that tell these stories. The Tuskegee Airmen is one that people have asked us about recently. There’s so many wonderful stories, not all African American. There’s interest at the moment to tell one about my husband, Robert Montgomery, a transplant surgeon. He was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2025.
What did you think when you heard Timothée Chalamet say he didn’t want to work in something like opera or ballet where people try to “keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore”?
It was one of the greatest gifts ever. It brought the spotlight on what it is we’re doing. All of sudden, there was so much interest. Everyone was posting and talking about it, and people wanted to come and see what [opera] was for themselves.
My daughter has had a crush on him from when she was very young. She’s about to graduate from college. Her walls are papered with him, and when she heard that, she said, “That’s it. I’m coming to the house and taking all that down.” But it was a gift. I’d like to get in touch with him and invite him to our [foundation’s] gala.
What convinced you to come to Burlington, and will you sing the “Habanera” for us?
Bill, the pianist, is my friend, and he’s friends with Patrick. He said, “Oh, come on, Denyce. It’ll be fun, and it’s for a good cause.”
We’re having a rehearsal today. We’re going to decide on the music. I said to Bill, “Nobody wants to see a 63-year-old Carmen.” He said, “I’m not so sure.” ➆
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Voice | Opera legend Denyce Graves makes a surprise appearance in Burlington to raise hurricane relief money for a Jamaican school”
This article appears in April 22 • 2026.
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