Yongzhao Yu, who won the Audience Choice Award and the Ana María Martínez Encouragement Award in HGO’s 2015 Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias, continues to make important debuts throughout the United States. In the current season, he sings the poet Rodolfo in La bohème for Arizona Opera, a role he has sung for Houston Grand Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, and covers for The Metropolitan Opera in the current season. Additionally, he makes his Seattle Opera debut as the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto and he covers the role of Alfredo in La traviata which he has also sung for Houston Grand Opera. In the 2016-2017 season he made his HGO stage debut as a Winged Angel in the world premiere of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s It’s a Wonderful Life. He has performed Flavio in Norma for Houston Grand Opera and with the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Naulz in Visitors on the Icy Mountain with the Shanghai Grand Theater, and Alfredo in the concert hall of the Shanghai Oriental Art Center. He has performed in concert in the Grand Theatre of the Suzhou Culture and Arts Center and in an Eternal Verdi concert in Shanghai in honor of the bicentenary of Verdi’s birth. Further awards include first prize in Opera Concorso. Recently he sang Alfredo in La traviata with Sacramento Philharmonic, the Aspen Opera Center, and in mainstage performances at Houston Grand Opera. In the 2018-2019 season, Yu joined the roster of The Metropolitan Opera for the first time to cover Alfredo in the new production by Michael Mayer.