Grammy Award–winning baritone Lucas Meachem—hailed as a “rock star of opera” by Opera Pulse, a “masterful musician” by Opera News, and an artist who “has it all” by Forum Opera—made his Festival debut in 2023, performing alongside a fellow Grammy winner, mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, for the Festival’s special 50th Anniversary Recital. This summer, on Wednesday, August 12, at noon, Meachem appears with his wife, Irina Meachem—whom Voce di Meche praised as “a gifted collaborative pianist”—in a recital that features a selection of stirring American art songs.
A North Carolina native, Meachem attended Appalachian State University before heading to the Eastman School of Music in New York and Yale University in Connecticut. In 2004, he won a coveted position as an Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera, and two years later, he gave a star-making performance at Lyric Opera of Chicago, where, at the last minute, he filled in as Oreste in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride opposite none other than Graham. Meachem’s Metropolitan Opera debut followed two years later, when he sang the role of General Rayevsky in Prokofiev’s War and Peace, and over the past two decades he’s sung major roles in major venues around the world, including La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, the Vienna Staatsoper, the Bayerische Staatsoper, the Semperoper Dresden, the Opéra national de Paris, LA Opera, and Houston Grand Opera, among many others.
Having won a Grammy in 2017 for his recording of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles with LA Opera, Meachem released his first solo album, Shall We Gather, in 2021. The album, which features Irina on the piano, received critical acclaim from the likes of BBC Music Magazine, which praised Meachem’s “heartbreakingly beautiful performance,” and The New Yorker, which noted that “Meachem’s voice—a substantial and propulsive lyric baritone with pillowy edges—records beautifully.” All of the proceeds from Shall We Gather benefit the Meachems’ Perfect Day Music Foundation, which takes its name from a song by the American songwriter Carrie Jacobs-Bond and was created, the Meachems note, “as a way to uplift and broaden the performance of music by underrepresented composers.”
In addition to his work in the world’s greatest concert halls, Meachem is well known for his social media output, with one video showing his exact opera-singing warm-up routine racking up more than 400,000 views on YouTube.
For their August 12 recital, the Meachems perform selections from Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs; Jake Heggie’s song cycle A Question of Light, which sets poems by the American songwriter and librettist Gene Scheer; and Kurt Weill’s Four Walt Whitman Songs. In a brief note on the program, Irina writes:
When words fall short, music remains. Not merely to express, but to hold, to guide, to remember. In these American art songs, we do not seek to define a national identity so much as to reflect on a collective human resilience.
This program draws from the voices of poets and composers who illuminate the enduring tension between struggle and hope. These songs are reminders of where we’ve come from, what we carry forward, and how art continues to shape the way we endure, dream, and belong.