“The program also featured the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, in lovely voice, singing Henri Dutilleux’s “Le Temps l’Horloge” song cycle, completed in 2009, haunting music that retains refined French impressionist colorings while speaking a boldly modernist language. She also sang an alluringly sensual account of Ravel’s “Shéhérazade.”” New York Times “Chemistry between Leonard and Nézet-Séguin truly […]

“Leonard sang Blanche with an astonishing mixture of softness and backbone. She has steadily marched toward stardom at the Met, and the affinity between her and Nézet-Séguin is evolving into one of the company’s great artistic partnerships. Her voice is purest vicuña: warm, fine, and naturally colored. She can be slow to shed her poise […]

“The tender lullaby of “Nana” featured gently cooing clarinets trailing after Leonard’s maternal timbre. The vivid orchestration, full of touches of Spanish percussion, complemented the intense narrative qualities of Leonard’s singing.” Washington Classical Review “The evening offered a simulacrum of an American program, polished and shiny. After the Copland, the American element in the second […]

“The cast is superb. I might quibble for a moment about the sheer beauty of everything about mezzo Isabel Leonard’s performances as Sister Blanche. With that velvet voice and those film-star looks, she seems too poised, even a bit smug, for an aristocrat too morbidly sensitive to venture out of a convent. But there is […]

“Leonard is a marvelous singer, period, but she’s a particularly fine Bernstein interpreter. Singing with unaffected direction, burnished tone (her lowest register is liquid bronze), and spot-on diction, she brought moral weight to the night’s most politically charged numbers (“Take Care of This House” and the anti-war “So Pretty”) without veering into preachiness.” Worcester’s Telegram […]