Performer: Karen Slack

Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking is credited as being the most performed 21st-century opera, and with good reason.

Dead Man Walking is currently the most frequently performed contemporary American opera. Joel Ivany's staging, first mounted in Vancouver, opened recently at Minnesota Opera just days after the opera's Spanish première in Madrid. 

Opera Parallele's production of Terence Blanchard's Champion: An Opera in Jazz features great performances but an uneven score and spotty blocking.

The marriage between performers and score here is perfect, because Gershwin’s text-setting is near-miraculous, somehow every word is clear and seems to be naturally inflected by the curvature of the musical line.