Omar Najmi sings the lead role in the Grammy-nominated Adoration. He also organizes performances with Boston’s Catalyst New Music. Photo by Nile Scott Studios

Music

Playing a Teenager May Earn This Alum a Grammy

Omar Najmi sang the lead role in Adoration, nominated for best opera recording

Omar Najmi had to take a slightly unusual approach to winning the role that earned him a Grammy nomination this year. He had to dial back his voice to sound more like a teenager.

“I was just like, all right! Here goes nothing!” Najmi (CFA’11) says with a laugh. “We’re just gonna try out some things.”

The tenor is nominated as the principal soloist in the Best Opera Recording category for Adoration, an electroacoustic chamber opera by composer Mary Kouyoumdjian and librettist Royce Vavrek. Produced in New York in collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects and adapted from the film by Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica), it follows a high school student whose fictional story about a terrorist plot goes viral.

The Washington Post praised the production for its “uncanny capture of the information age and its anxieties,” adding, “It’s an opera that could help shape the future of the form.”

Najmi sings the lead character, Simon, a jeans-and-hoodie-clad 17-year-old. When he auditioned, he used his regular, full-bodied operatic voice. “I don’t remember if it was Beth or Mary, the composer, saying, ‘Okay, that was beautiful, but this role is a 17-year-old high school student. Can you sing these excerpts in a way that’s younger-sounding and less bel canto [style]?’’ 

“So I pared down the sound a lot—I sang on a fraction of my sound, minimized the vibrato, used a lot of straight tone,” he says. “What’s gonna feel like I sounded like when I was young? I allowed a little bit of roughness around the edges where it doesn’t sound so studied, if you will. And they loved it.”

He has plenty else going on. Recent performances include roles with The Spoleto Festival, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Tucson Symphony, and multiple productions at Boston Lyric Opera. Not to mention his own composing.

Najmi was born in California, and his family moved to his mother’s hometown of Reading, Mass., when he was two. Their new house had a piano, so he and his two brothers took lessons. He was the only one who stuck with it, learning classical repertoire. By high school, he was also hanging around the school’s theater department.

“We did a production of Les Mis in my junior year, in which I played Javert,” he says, “and the director of the theater program said, just kind of offhand, ‘So you’re gonna think about majoring in this, right?’ And I didn’t know that was a thing at all. My parents are both from a science and engineering background, and I figured I would go into something science-y.”

Najmi went to Ithaca College for musical theater, but his voice was ill-suited for the pop-rock productions like Rent that were on the upswing. He had already started singing some classical, and eventually he transferred to the school of music at Ithaca and found his future.

“I got seduced by classical singing, and I think also my voice was always a classical voice, even before I had ever trained classically,” he says.

He met faculty with ties to BU; his voice teacher at Ithaca, for example, was Jennifer Kay (CFA’01,’08), an assistant professor. So from Ithaca, Najmi came to the College of Fine Arts to earn a Master of Music.

Biggest asset: BU Opera Institute

“The biggest asset that the program at BU had for me professionally was the Opera Institute,” Najmi says. “So I was singing alongside amazing career-ready singers. One of them is now singing leading Wagner roles at Bayreuth. That was a huge influence on me, learning how to sing next to these people.”

His first professional roles came through members of the BU faculty who had positions with the Boston Lyric Opera and other companies in the city. They often thought of him when they needed a last-minute tenor replacement.

One of his first gigs after BU was with a now-defunct group that performed contemporary chamber operas. “The tenor who was singing this leading narrator role had a [health issue],” he says, “and they needed someone to come in and learn this wildly atonal opera on a day’s notice. I think I was one of the few people who could have done that.”

He has “the great luxury” of being married to a pianist: Brendon Shapiro (CFA’12), Najmi adds. Shapiro is a member of the music staff at Boston Lyric Opera and has played in productions there and with many other companies. “I got that offer,” he says, “and we’re like, ‘All right, we’re gonna lock ourselves in a practice room all day, and we’re gonna make this happen.”

From there, it has been a slow climb through the sometimes grueling ranks of rising artists here in Boston, in New York, and beyond.

His bent for contemporary opera is a combination of his skill set and the lure of a wide array of stories and how they’re told. “I’m doing so many world premieres, and when I’m creating a role, it feels so different,” he says. “I’m not trying to recreate the vocal affectations that some other famous singer did. I can invent what it is, and that feels hugely empowering.”

Najmi is also “something of a music-theory savant,” he says with a smile, and it is hard to remember a time when he did not also think of himself as a composer. He has had several productions of his compositions, including his opera Mud Girl, with librettist Christine Evans, which premiered at the Kennedy Center in January 2025 as part of Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative.

He and Shapiro are building a nonprofit chamber-opera performance company for piano and voices, Catalyst New Music, in Boston. They hope to collaborate with Boston Lyric Opera on one of Najmi’s works.

Many months ago, Najmi reached out to an agent he’d known for years to invite her to one of his performances, and while they were talking, she said he should audition for a role for Beth Morrison’s (CFA’94) organization. That was Adoration, and the rest is, possibly, Grammy history.

Coming up: performances in Prague, in New York City, and with the Boston Baroque. Then, with the Minnesota Opera, Najmi will premiere the leading tenor role in The Many Deaths of Layla Starr by Kamala Shankaram. He has already done two workshop performances.

“It’s such a cool story,” he says. “It’s based on a graphic novel set partially in the world of the Hindu deities and partially on Earth, and I’m the human who invents immortality, putting the goddess of death out of business, essentially. So I’m really excited about that.”