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 ’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.