Soprano Sumi Jo marks 40 years on world stage, signs to SM with new album ‘Continuum’

Soprano Sumi Jo speaks during a press conference that marks the 40th anniversary of her international debut in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

Soprano Sumi Jo is marking the 40th anniversary of her international career with a new album, a fresh partnership with K-pop powerhouse SM Entertainment and a yearlong slate of concerts and mentorship projects that she hopes will carry her legacy into the next generation.

At a press conference in Seoul on Wednesday, the 61-year-old singer looked back on four decades of breakthroughs, beginning with her 1986 debut as Gilda in Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at Teatro Verdi in Trieste, Italy.

Since winning major competitions and joining leading opera houses abroad, Jo has built a globe-spanning career that has taken her to the world’s top stages, from La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera to concert halls across Asia, Europe and the Americas.

She became the first Asian to sweep seven major vocal competitions and star as prima donna at five of the world’s leading opera houses. Also, she became the first Asian and first Korean to win a Grammy for Best Opera Recording and Commandeur of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Her exclusive recording contract with SM Entertainment is central to this new chapter. Under the deal, SM will handle global distribution and promotion of “Continuum” and future projects, using its vast K-pop infrastructure to reach listeners who may have never set foot in an opera house.

“The title of the special album is a Latin word meaning ‘to continue,’ and rather than piecing together songs that I have already sung as a classical artist, I wanted to reinterpret my life through new music and another kind of language,” she said.

Soprano Sumi Jo, right, poses with SM Entertainment Chief A&R Officer Lee Sung-soo during a press conference in Seoul, Wednesday, marking the 40th anniversary of her global career and Jo’s exclusive recording contract with SM Classics, SM Entertainment’s classical music label. Yonhap

Their first collaboration, “Continuum,” underscores Jo’s drive to expand her musical range, pairing high-difficulty coloratura arias with a special-track duet featuring EXO member Suho. Jo said she is “a great lover and proud supporter of K-pop” and wanted artists from “distinctly different positions” to create a new musical language together.

The 11-track set includes works by acclaimed composers such as Yiruma, Park Jong-hoon and Kim Jin-hwan, written to reflect episodes from her life, from the fear and homesickness of her student days abroad to her hopes and anxieties about the future.

She said she hopes to move beyond the “rigid frame” of classical music and use SM’s global network and content ecosystem to bring the genre to a wider audience.

SM Chief A&R Officer Lee Sung-soo called the partnership “an honor” and “a new starting point” for K-pop’s long-term growth through deeper engagement with classical music.

Looking back on the past four decades, Jo recalled one of her most unforgettable moments onstage: a 2000 performance with North Korean musicians where a soprano who had joined her in the brindisi from “La Traviata” wept as she asked, “When will we ever meet again?” — a moment that made Jo feel, in her words, “that we truly are one people.”

She named her parents as the greatest mentors of her musical life, saying the discipline and belief they instilled in her have sustained her career. She chose her parents’ hometown, Changwon in South Gyeongsang Province, as the first stop on her upcoming Korea tour, saying that although they are no longer by her side, she wants to “play this album live” for them there.

To celebrate the anniversary, Jo is planning a packed calendar of performances at home and abroad. From May to December, she will tour some 20 cities across Korea with programs tracing her artistic journey and will headline two stages at the Seoul Arts Center in September — an anniversary recital and “The Magic, Sumi Jo and Winners,” a gala with laureates from her own competition.

Next month, she will be honored at the Samsung Ho-Am Prize for the Arts ceremony for her four decades of achievement, and in July the second Sumi Jo International Singing Competition will be held in France. Since its 2024 opening, hundreds of young vocalists from around the world have applied for the contest.

Jo said she now hopes to stand beside younger artists not only as a performer but as a mentor, using her competition, master classes and new projects with SM to help them build careers rooted in their own identity and a sense of freedom onstage.

“Forty years is not an end but a new beginning,” she said. “And I want to continue delivering resonant echoes through music that linger in people’s hearts for a long time.”