Check out highlights of the festivities and opera stars performing for Richard Tucker Day, after the jump.
- At noon, the Manhattan-based Opera Collective - as featured on NHK's documentary series New York Streets - will present a concert celebrating the centennial at Richard Tucker Square (Broadway between W. 65th and W. 66th Streets), as part of Lincoln Square's Business Improvement District's Free Lunchtime Concert Series.
- Beginning at 2pm, Tucker Foundation award- and grant-winning singers will present an Aria-thon at Richard Tucker Square, singing beloved pieces from some of the 30 different operas in which Tucker starred at the Met during his 30-year career at the famed house.
- At 4pm, the Richard Tucker Music Foundation will hold a panel discussion on the great tenor's legacy at The Juilliard School. The distinguished speakers will include superstar soprano and 1990 Tucker Award-winner Renée Fleming; Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is an ardent, life-long fan of opera; and lyric tenor Neil Shicoff, who serves on the Tucker Foundation's audition panel and whose father, like Richard Tucker, was an American-Jewish opera singer and cantor.
- Richard Tucker Day will conclude with a 7:30pm concert at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park. Renée Fleming hosts the evening, while performers will include lyric soprano Ailyn Pérez, winner of the 2012 Tucker Award; mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, a 2012 Tucker Career Grant recipient and winner of the 2013 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition; 2009 Tucker Award-winning tenor Stephen Costello; tenor Paul Appleby, who won a Career Grant from the Foundation in 2011; and 2013 Career Grant recipient, soprano Erin Morley will join other Tucker Foundation laureates in a musical tribute to the great tenor's legacy.
