Some of the greatest singers at the Metropolitan Opera, past and present, joined the Met roster through the opera company’s audition program for young North Americans — among them, Renée Flemi...

Some of the greatest singers at the Metropolitan Opera, past and present, joined the Met roster through the opera company’s audition program for young North Americans — among them, Renée Fleming, Thomas Hampson and Jessye Norman. Today, the audition program is known as the Laffont Competition.

Though the competition dates all the way back to the 1930s, it was only in 2018 that the Met began inviting competitors from a part of North America it had overlooked — Mexico.

The San Miguel MetOpera Trust, a donataria autorizada, was created to oversee the Met competition throughout Mexico, and it has already begun to launch careers. Talented young Mexican singers who might otherwise have languished in obscurity have found themselves performing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. All the competition winners have the potential of international stardom.

One Mexican singer who has found herself on the Met stage, as a Laffont semifinalist, is soprano Jennifer Mariel, a native of Cancun. Earlier this month, Mariel was awarded a residency at Ravinia, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony.

On Saturday, March 30, at 4pm, you can hear Mariel and three other singers named winners last November in the annual MetOpera audition competition. Those other singers are Rafael Rojas, tenor; Raul Morales, bass; and Olymar Sandoval, tenor. The concert will take place this year at the La Casona Convention Center, at Josefina Orozco 2, San Miguel de Allende.

All seats are numbered and reserved, and there will be supertitles in English and Spanish for all the music on the program: arias, duets, trios and quartets, from composers including Puccini, Gounod, Donizetti, Gershwin, Bernstein, Weill and Catán. The musical offerings have been staged by artistic director Ragnar Conde; the pianist is Andrés Sarre.