Photograph by Beth Coller. Courtesy of the L.A. Times

A talented ingenue L.A. Opera’s soprano, Angel Joy Blue, in L.A. Opera’s costume shop, was born to sing.

By Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 6, 2008

When she was born, Angel Joy Blue’s father, Sylvester Blue, held her up and noticed that she had a big upper chest and a good pair of lungs. “This is the next Leontyne Price,” he said, or at least that’s what family lore says he said.

Today she is 24, is luminously beautiful and has already sung the role of Musetta in “La Bohème” for the Los Angeles Opera under the baton of Plácido Domingo. Sadly, Sylvester passed away in 2006 and missed his daughter’s debut.

But he was there in spirit. “I looked down at Plácido, and it honestly did not seem real,” says Blue, a first-year singer in the opera’s Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program, which this year includes seven other singers and one pianist who possess “potentially international stature.”

“But when I caught his eye, he looked so happy that he reminded me of my father,” Blue recalls, “and I just thought, ‘You’re singing for Dad,’ and that helped a lot.”

As a child growing up in Apple Valley, Blue would often take five or six months off from school to travel the country in a trailer with her mom, dad and four siblings, playing instruments and singing classical and gospel music at churches and ministries–a veritable Partridge Family of the early ’90s. Once she was accepted by the L.A. County High School for the Arts, the family curtailed touring so she could settle down and study.

Read the entire story at: http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-soprano6apr06,1,1905589.story