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The fast-rising young tenor Stephen Costello has firmly established himself as one of the current generation’s most impressive artists. He came to national attention in 2007 when, at age 26, he debuted at the Met’s season- opening night and was quickly invited to appear again that same season. In 2009, Costello won the prestigious Richard Tucker Award. He subsequently made his debuts at a number of the world’s most important opera houses and music festivals, including London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Salzburg Festival, and the Vienna State Opera. In 2010 he inaugurated the role of Greenhorn in the Dallas Opera’s acclaimed world-premiere production of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby Dick.

His performances as Cassio in Verdi’s Otello, conducted by Riccardo Muti at the Salzburg Festival, were released on DVD in 2010 (Major/Naxos), and his Covent Garden debut in Linda di Chamounix was released on CD in March 2011 (Opera Rara).

Next week Stephen Costello will headline Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Canadian Opera Company as Edgardo opposite soprano Anna Christy in a revival of David Alden’s ground-breaking English National Opera production.

It was in Lucia that the tenor made his house debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera back in 2007, when his portrayal of Arturo so impressed Met Music Director James Levine that the young tenor found himself undertaking the opera’s male lead that same season. As Parterre.com reports, thanks to his “youth, sweet timbre, precocious poise, and emotional involvement” as Edgardo, it was Costello who “got the biggest ovation at the end” of the night.

Stephen Costello opens in Lucia di Lammermoor with the Canadian Opera Company on April 16th

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In Hollywood it may be fashionable—even desirable—for stars to get hitched. Not so in the world of opera, where singing schedules can play havoc with marital bliss. However, at least one vocally gifted couple is making it work onstage and off. Stephen Costello and Ailyn Pérez—husband and wife, tenor and soprano—seem to be a match made in verismo heaven. They are the only couple to have both won the annual Richard Tucker Award to an American opera singer on the threshold of a major career—he in 2009, she this year. They met as students at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts, and since their marriage, in 2008, their careers have taken off independently and as a duo. Costello opened this Metropolitan Opera season opposite Anna Netrebko in Anna Bolena as Pérez was finishing a run as Marguerite in Faust at the Santa Fe Opera. Yet they seem destined to be cast together, most recently in La Traviata at the Royal Opera in January. “When there’s a married couple onstage, people expect the love duets to be even more fiery,” says Pérez. And there’s more passion to come this year—La Bohème at the L.A. Opera in May, Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz in Moscow, and another La Traviata, in Cincinnati. Outside the opera house, the pair couldn’t be more down to earth about the challenges of being diva and divo under one roof. They have a house in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but, as Costello says, “we don’t practice at home. It’s very dangerous to do that, because we have very different ideas about how something is supposed to go.”