Joshua Blue

After winning major prizes, tenor Joshua Blue has appeared with the Metropolitan Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, and other major American companies. His repertory also includes Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, as well as other major choral works. Blue was born in Haywards Heath, England, near London. Blue came to the U.S. and attended Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory, graduating in 2016. He went on to the Juilliard School in New York, studying with Robert C. White Jr. In 2017, he won the Ellen Lopin Blair top prize in the Oratorio Society of New York solo competition; and was named an Emerging Artist in the 2017 Opera Index Competition in New York City that year. During the 2017-2018 season, he sang the tenor solo part in Handel's Messiah with the ensemble Musica Sacra. The year 2018 brought Blue his Juilliard master's degree, a semifinalist showing in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, and appearances on the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis recording of Jack Perla's opera Shalimar the Clown and on the soundtrack of the Oscar-nominated short film My Nephew Emmett. Blue went on to win several other prizes, including the inaugural James McCracken and Sandra Warfield Opera Prize in 2020 and the Mabel Dorn Reeder Foundation Prize from the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2022. In 2019, Blue made his debut with Washington National Opera at Kennedy Center, singing Alfredo in Verdi's La Traviata in a Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Performance, and in 2019, he appeared at New York's Carnegie Hall with the Oratorio Society of New York in Verdi's Requiem mass. Appearances at major U.S. houses followed, including, in 2021-2022, New York's Metropolitan Opera as Peter in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and Opera Philadelphia as the Duke of Mantua in Verdi's Rigoletto. He has continued to sing concert parts, including the Evangelist in a danced production of Bach's St. Matthew Passion with the Los Angeles Opera in 2021-2022, and the tenor part in Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 2022-2023. Blue appeared in 2020 on a recording of Paul Moravec's opera Sanctuary Road and in 2022 on one of Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson's Blue. In 2023, Blue made his solo recording debut on the NYFOS Records label with Black & Blue, a recital of jazz and blues songs on which he was accompanied by pianist Steven Blier.
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