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Although Patrick Summers is best known as a conductor of contemporary opera, particularly American opera, his work extends across the standard operatic and symphonic repertoire. He has worked in some of the world's most prestigious opera houses and regularly conducts at the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Houston Opera, and Opera Australia. At the San Francisco Opera and Houston Grand Opera he has played a key role in the development of over a dozen world premieres.

Summers grew up in Loogootee, IN, and studied at Indiana University. After graduation he worked with San Francisco's Western Opera Theater and the Merola Opera Program. He has been principal guest conductor of the San Francisco Opera since 1989. He made his premiere with Opera Australia in 1994. Summers' first performance at the Metropolitan Opera was a 1998 performance of Die Fledermaus. He became music director of Houston Grand Opera in 1998 and in 2011 was appointed to the company's newly created dual position of artistic and music director. Summers' involvement in the creation of new operas had begun at the San Francisco Opera, where he led André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire and Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's Dead Man Walking. In Houston he has continued to work extensively with living composers and has commissioned and premiered a number of new operas, many of which are among the most significant and popular American works of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Works that he has been instrumental in creating include Mark Adamo's Little Women, Rachel Portman's The Little Prince, and Carlisle Floyd's Cold Sassy Tree. Tod Machover, Daniel Catán, Lee Hoiby, Michael Daugherty, and Christopher Theofanidis are among the composers with whom he has worked.

He has also led performances at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, Welsh National Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Opéra de Bordeaux, Rome Opera, and Lisbon Opera. Orchestras that he has led include the Boston Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

In 2002 he received a Grammy Award for the album Bel Canto, featuring soprano Renée Fleming and the Orchestra of St. Luke's. Other recordings include Adamo's Little Women, Heggie's Dead Man Walking, Catán's Florencia en el ÍøÆغÚÁÏas, and Previn's Brief Encounter, as well as DVDs of The Marriage of Figaro, La Cenerentola, I Puritani, and Madama Butterfly.

American singer Thomas Hampson has been one of the world's top opera stars since the early 1990s, with more than 200 recordings to his credit. Hampson combines a mellifluous tone that has proven remarkably durable, a powerful top, and charisma that saw him named one of the world's 50 most beautiful people by the U.S. magazine People in 1993.

Hampson was born on June 28, 1955, in Elkhart, Indiana, but grew up in Spokane, Washington. He and his two older sisters sang in church, but at first, he was unsure of his career choice: he attended Eastern Washington University, graduating with a government major, but also earned a voice degree from Fort Wright College. Summer classes at the Music Academy of the West with baritone Martial Singher and a second-place finish in the Metropolitan Opera's Western Region auditions in 1980 tipped the scales. Hampson traveled to Europe for auditions, studying with contralto Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and joining the company of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf in 1981. Engaged for bigger and better roles, he joined the Zurich Opera in 1984, gave a Wigmore Hall debut recital touted by Schwarzkopf, made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Count Almaviva in 1986, and by the late '80s was clearly one of opera's top rising stars. Performing in several famed readings of Mahler works conducted late in life by Leonard Bernstein cemented his reputation; a 1986 recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A minor with Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic was an early recording triumph.

Since then, there is hardly a major world opera house or concert venue in which he has not appeared. Hampson has had a flair for highly visible public performances, such as a 1991 Live from Lincoln Center television broadcast of Copland's Old American Songs with the New York Philharmonic and a 2009 recital at the Supreme Court of the United States, populated by opera-loving justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. Yet he has also championed new music, giving world premieres of operas by Richard Danielpour, Michael Daugherty, and others. He has a repertory of nearly 100 operas, spanning the genre's entire temporal range, taking up new darker-toned roles such as Amfortas in Wagner's Parsifal and Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca in middle age. He has continued to specialize in Mahler, whose large-scale but lyric music fits his voice beautifully.

Yet Hampson has also been clearly defined as an American singer, performing repertory from that country, teaching and serving on the board of the Manhattan School of Music, and winning induction into the elite American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. That year, he participated in the first broadcast of classical music on a streaming mobile phone app, teaching a master class in Mahler song at the Manhattan School of Music. He has also been open to crossover projects, such as a CNN television musical exchange with South African vocal harmony group Ladysmith Black Mambazo in 2012. The pace of Hampson's recording career did not slow in the late 2010s and early 2020s; the year 2018 saw his debut on the Cedille label with a song recital, Songs from Chicago. In 2023, he released a pair of albums, appearing on a Capriccio recording of Kurt Weill's cantata Propheten and issuing an album of Liszt orchestral songs on Aparté. ~ James Manheim

Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni has emerged as an important specialist in in operatic roles of Mozart and Handel. In opera and also in concert choral music roles, he has sung with top conductors in both the modern-instrument and historical-performance fields.

Pisaroni was born in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, on June 8, 1975. His family was Italian, and they moved back to Italy when he was four; Pisaroni grew up there in Busseto, the hometown of Verdi. He attended the opera often with his father as a child, and by the time he was 11 he had settled on an operatic career. Pisaroni took lessons at a local school run by famed tenor Carlo Bergonzi; although he did not study directly with Bergonzi, he heard him sing and teach, and he counts Bergonzi as an influence. Pisaroni enrolled at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan but then traveled to New York and Buenos Aires for lessons with Renato Sassola and Rosita Zozulya, respectively.

Pisaroni made his debut as Figaro in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2001 and quickly found other roles; that year he earned the Vienna State Opera's Eberhard Wächter Medal as a leading artist of the new generation. He sang the bass part in Haydn's Mass in D minor, Hob. 22/11 ("Lord Nelson Mass"), at the 2002 Salzburg Festival and parlayed that successful appearance into roles at the festival by Mozart, Gluck, and Rossini. Since then, Pisaroni's career has focused but not been restricted to Mozart and Handel roles. He has appeared as Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as Melisso in Handel's Alcina at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, and in several roles, including Guglielmo in Mozart's Così fan tutte at England's Glyndebourne Festival, among many other major venues.

Pisaroni's recordings have been devoted mostly to Handel and Mozart, including a starring role in conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin's 2015 live recording of Le nozze di Figaro on Deutsche Grammophon. In 2018, however, he appeared in a San Francisco Symphony recording of Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette. Pisaroni received an Opera News award in 2019. ~ James Manheim