UGA Vocal Performance Alumnus Clay Hilley Named Recipient of 2024 Richard Tucker Award

UGA Vocal Performance alumnus Clay Hilley (BMus. ‘04) has been named the winner of the 2024 Richard Tucker Award. The award comes with a $50,000 cash prize as well as the ongoing support of the Tucker family and foundation. It is hoped that the award acts as a well-timed catalyst to elevate the selected artist’s career to even greater heights. The Richard Tucker Award is selected by conferral, rather than audition.

“The Richard Tucker Music Foundation is proud to announce that tenor Clay Hilley is the recipient of the 2024 Richard Tucker Award,” remarks Barry Tucker, President. “The purpose of this award is to recognize an artist poised on the verge of a major international opera career, and Clay Hilley fits that description perfectly. Clay has developed into that rarest of singers, a true Heldentenor, specializing in the almost unsingable roles of Wagner and Richard Strauss. His breakthrough moment was stepping into the opening of a new production of Götterdämmerung at the Bayreuth Festival in 2022, and his performances of the leading Wagner and Strauss roles at Bayreuth, the Deutsche Opera Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, and with the Berlin Philharmonic have announced him as a leading Heldentenor of his generation. We are proud to support and honor this impressive singer who we believe will continue the legacy of the Richard Tucker Award.”

Clay Hilley shares, “I am stunned and thrilled to learn that I’ve been selected to receive the most coveted of all singer prizes, the Richard Tucker Award. Being counted among the elite singers who’ve claimed this award over time is an ecstatic thing. I humbly thank the Board of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation for finding me worthy. I also cannot fail to thank the One from whom all talent flows. Soli Deo gloria.”

Winning critical acclaim for “vocal heft, clarion sound and stamina” (New York Times) and for performances described as “close to perfection – powerful, subtle, intelligent, every word crystal clear” (Financial Times), American Heldentenor Clay Hilley continues to garner success in an ever-growing list of opera’s most monumental heroic roles. After stepping into the premiere of Bayreuth’s new Götterdämmerung at one day’s notice in 2022, Hilley returned to the Bayreuth Festival last summer as Tristan, one of several Wagnerian roles now featuring prominently in his operatic diary. The 2023-24 season included his debut as the title role of Tannhäuser at the Edinburgh International Festival in a concert performance with Sir Donald Runnicles and at the Deutsche Oper Berlin later with fully-staged performances in Berlin led by Pietari Inkinen; a house debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper in the title role of Parsifal, conducted by Adam Fischer; and features a return to the Deutsche Oper Berlin as Siegfried in a revival of Stefan Herheim’s production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Additionally, the tenor joined the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Music Director Karina Canellakis for a concert performance of Siegfried at Amsterdam’s venerable Concertgebouw. Beyond Wagner, Clay Hilley also appeared this season as Beethoven’s Florestan (Fidelio) for the Canadian Opera Company, with conductor Johannes Debus, Strauss’s Bacchus (Ariadne auf Naxos) at the Hong Kong Arts Festival with the orchestra of the Bayerische Staatsoper under Patrick Lange, and made his Staatsoper Hamburg debut as Laca in Janáček’s Jenůfa, in performances conducted by Tomáš Netopil.

Past winners of the Richard Tucker Award include Angel Blue, Jamie Barton, Stephanie Blythe, Lawrence Brownlee, Joyce DiDonato, Renée Fleming, Christine Goerke, Isabel Leonard, Lisette Oropesa, Matthew Polenzani, Nadine Sierra, and Deborah Voigt.