Suffolk native and opera extraordinaire Speedo Green performing with the Virginia Opera

Ryan “Speedo” Green has sung opera in prestigious halls around the world, including New York City’s Metropolitan Opera and Vienna’s State Opera in Austria.

Yet the world-renowned bass-baritone singer from Suffolk never has performed with his hometown opera company.

That changes Saturday night.

Green will take the Chrysler Hall stage backed by the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and under the direction of Adam Turner, the opera’s artistic director. Thanks to a collaboration with the Virginia Arts Festival, the event is one of the area’s biggest in-person performances since venues shuttered last spring

“I’m 35 years old, have sung in some of the greatest opera houses on the planet, yet this is my first time ever coming to my home state to sing opera with Virginia Opera,” he said in a FaceTime call from Vienna.

It’s been a longtime coming for Green, though truth be told, he angled to make it happen years ago.

He sent in his application to audition for the opera’s young artist program in 2011 but was rejected.

“I didn’t even get an audition,” he said, recalling the disappointment from being turned down by his hometown opera.

A few weeks later, the Metropolitan Opera not only gave him an audition but a spot on its Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. There, he’d sing on the very stage that inspired him to pursue a life in opera.

“I don’t know who they chose over me or who got an audition… to think, Virginia Opera might’ve took my audition, they would’ve been associated with a Met Opera singer,” he said coyly.

Peggy Dye, Virginia Opera’s relatively new general director and CEO (she stepped into the role last fall), said the organization was “thrilled to work with Ryan Speedo Green, whose voice lifts opera as an art form as it inspires the next generation of opera artists” in a news release about Green’s concert.

During Saturday’s show, Green will perform many of the songs that helped establish his career. For some, he’ll share the stage with singers from the opera’s Emerging Artists Program, something he hopes will be as much of a learning experience for the singers as performing with professionals was for him a decade ago.

“I remember some of the best experiences I had, to actually know how some of the greatest singers in the world did what they did was by being in shows with those signers. Some of my first shows at the Met, I sang maybe three words in a show that lasted three-and-a-half hours long, but I was able to go to rehearsals with the best singers in the world,” he said.

Cultivating talent is paramount to Green, as is encouraging diversity in both an opera’s cast and audience — something Dye said was a big priority for the opera under her leadership in an interview with The Pilot last year.

That’s great news to Green.

“Growing up in southeastern Virginia as an African American, opera, for me, was something I never thought I could be a part of because there’s a preconception with opera that it’s something only white people can do. It’s been an elitist art form,” he said.

Green’s early years were much different from those of his peer performers, the entirety of his past — from growing up in a mobile park and spending time in a juvenile detention center — detailed in Daniel Bergner’s book, “Sing for Your Life: A Story of Race, Music and Family.”

It took a trip to the Met with the Governor’s School of the Arts when green was 15 to see otherwise. It was there that he saw the French opera “Carmen,” and was stunned by Washington, D.C., native Denyce Graves’ portrayal of the title role.

Music represents and connects us all, he said, and classical melodies have long served as the melodic bridge between countries, ethnicities and identities.

“For me, to have my color represented on one of the biggest opera stages in the world, performing in a foreign language one of, arguably, the greatest operas of all time? It broke that preconception that teenage Ryan Speedo Green thought opera was.”

Amy Poulter, 757.446.2705, amy.poulter@pilotonline.com

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If you go

Who: Ryan “Speedo” Green in concert with the Virginia Symphony and singers from the Virginia Opera’s emerging artists program

When: Saturday, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Chrysler Hall, 215 St. Pauls Blvd., Norfolk

Tickets: $26.25–$55; vafest.org or by calling the box office at 757.282.2822