There are many ways of knowing Karen Slack.
Maybe you happened upon her pearly, supercharged voice at the Grant Park Music Festival’s Juneteenth concert, singing Jessie Montgomery’s mighty and devastating “Five Freedom Songs.” Maybe, stir-crazy during the pandemic lockdown, you tuned into her #KiKiKonversations, her Facebook Live interviews with other music industry professionals.
But if these words are your introduction, trust you’ll be hearing plenty from Slack this year. The operatic soprano, 48, will spend the 2024-25 season as the artist-in-residence of Lyric Unlimited, Lyric Opera’s education and community programming arm. Whitney Morrison, also a soprano and an alumna of Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center training program, inaugurated the position last season.
“What we do onstage is so grand and big, but I’m not a cake topper or angel on a Christmas tree. (The point) is to get into the community and say, ‘Hey, I’m Karen Slack. I have this beautiful gift. But here’s who I am as a person; I want to connect,’” she told the Tribune in a backstage interview.
Slack was born and raised in Philadelphia, where she still lives when she’s not jetsetting. Her father was a hospital security guard and her mother worked two jobs; she ended up marrying her childhood sweetheart from the middle-class north Philly neighborhood they both grew up in.
Apropos of Lyric Unlimited’s mission, Slack knows well how transformative a single trip to the opera can be. Seeing “Carmen” at the Academy of Music, starring Denyce Graves, sealed the deal for her as a high schooler.
But, as Slack stressed in our conversation, the Lyric Unlimited residency is less about bringing Chicagoans to opera than it is about bringing opera to Chicagoans. How artists-in-residence do that, exactly, is up to them, says Lyric Unlimited vice president Afton Battle. For her residency, for example, Morrison designed a performance-art installation that plopped her inside a pop-up greenhouse around the city.
“This role is really malleable in that it’s a place of creation and curation for the artist,” Battle says.
Slack’s residency, unsurprisingly, leans on her interview acumen after months of hosting #KikiKonversations. She’ll lead post-performance talkbacks throughout the season, and another initiative, “My Part of Town,” reconnects local artists with their old Chicago neighborhoods to discuss how they got into opera and ended up at Lyric.
“I do believe in bringing the art form to the people. They’re not going to come to you,” Slack says.
Unlike her predecessor Morrison, Slack wasn’t plucked from Lyric’s regular artist roster for the position. Before her appointment, she sang in just one Lyric production, as Serena in its 2014 “Porgy and Bess.” Her rendition of “My Man’s Gone Now” was hailed by this paper as “one of the evening’s high points.”
In recent years, however, Slack’s entrepreneurial spirit, enthusiasm and crackling warmth have made her a first-call collaborator, especially in the Black classical world. This July she released “Beyond the Years,” an album with pianist and fellow Philadelphian Michelle Cann of hitherto unrecorded songs by the late Chicago composer Florence Price. Still forthcoming is “African Queens” (premiering Aug. 1 at the Ravinia Festival), a song cycle devised by and written for Slack by a group of composers calling themselves the Blacknificent 7. Each of the seven — who include the Chicago-based Montgomery, Shawn Okpebholo and Damien Geter — contributed songs inspired by mythic or real-life female rulers, like the Queen of Sheba and Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba.
The “African Queens” project already has long legs, with a recording and orchestral arrangement in the works. In the meantime, a national tour takes it to the Kennedy Center in the spring.
“So many women’s stories were colored by the experiences she had with men — that was frustrating for me,” Slack says. “I got my mind blown by these women. I didn’t even know that in African culture, the women are at the top. But it makes sense when you think about how your household is run, right? It’s always mama.”
Geter’s song, “Amanirenas,” describes the Kushite queen who successfully beat back a Roman invasion. Slack and Geter met singing together in the American Spiritual Ensemble nearly a decade ago and recently rekindled their friendship as co-artistic advisors at Portland Opera. Geter composed his “Justice Symphony” for Slack in 2020, and he wrote a role in his upcoming opera “Loving v. Virginia,” about the landmark interracial marriage ruling of the same name, with her “silvery but steely” voice in mind.
“One of her strengths is her ability to make a line soar. So, anytime I can find moments that will allow her voice to just open up and soar, that’s what I’m writing for,” he says.
Amid the masterclasses, neighborhood visits and talks, audiences will have plenty of chances to catch that voice live. One is fast approaching on Aug. 25: “Sunday in the Park with Lyric,” the company’s annual season preview at Pritzker Pavilion. Though dates are not yet public, Slack’s residency will be bookended by two recitals: “Of Thee I Sing: Songs of Love and Justice” in the fall, and a live presentation of “Beyond the Years” in the spring.
Slack first presented “Of Thee I Sing” as a virtual recital in late 2020, amid the aftershocks of the murder of George Floyd and a recharged racial justice movement. 19th-century German lieder and verismo warhorses were once Slack’s bread and butter. But the moment demanded more of her than standard repertoire, she recalls. Instead, she curated a program of freedom songs from across the classical and folk repertoire.
“At the time, I really didn’t want to sing arias. I didn’t even want to do opera. The one thing I felt comfortable doing was spirituals,” Slack says.
She followed her gut and hasn’t looked back. Now, she’s a powerhouse commissioner, primarily of Black composers.
Slack admits she’s had flashes of uncertainty along the way. For decades, Black singers have been pigeonholed for their race — call it the “Porgy and Bess” effect — and she was wary of taking a career turn that might box her in further. For years, Slack made a point of only singing Serena in “important houses, with great casts.”
Since the pandemic, however, Slack has taken that metaphor and — like the rest of her career — reframed it entirely.
“When I come into these spaces, I have to (wonder), ‘Are they going to just see me for my Blackness?’ Keeping people in boxes makes them easier to move around,” she says.
“So, I’ve been turning it around: OK, see me for my Blackness — and I’m bringing the whole excellence, humanity and fullness of myself. I’m going to decorate my box the way I want to.”
“African Queens,” 7:30 p.m. Aug. 1 at Ravinia’s Martin Theatre, 201 Ravinia Park Rd., Highland Park; tickets $40-$60 in the auditorium, $15 on the lawn; more information at ravinia.org
“Sunday in the Park with Lyric,” 7 p.m. Aug 25 at Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St.; free; more information at lyricopera.org
“Beyond the Years” (Azica Records) available for purchase and streaming.
