On a snowy Detroit afternoon, Lawrence Mitchell-Matthews pauses to savor the cold weather. “I’ve always loved fresh, crisp air,” he says. “It’s like a glass of water. The air is so much fresher in the winter.”
At age 35, the native Detroiter and father of two has stepped into a new season, marked by his front-stage debut at Detroit Opera in Highways and Valleys, the company’s season-opening double bill.
“It’s mind-blowing,” says Mitchell-Matthews, who performed dual roles as the Preacher in Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley and the Sheriff in William Grant Still’s Highway 1, USA in December 2025. The offer, he says, felt deeply full circle, having arrived from the same person who had encouraged him to go to college and build his foundation decades earlier.
Mitchell-Matthews, who grew up on Seven Mile in the Nortown neighborhood, was raised in the Baptist tradition, surrounded by deacons, pastors, and a family of singers. In his household, worship and music were inseparable. “We can’t all talk at the same time, but we can all sing together,” he recalls hearing often.
His formal introduction to opera came in high school at the Detroit School of Arts, where vocal teacher Cheryl Valentine helped shape his early training. As a teenager, Mitchell-Matthews performed the lead role in The Mikado during a summer at Interlochen Arts Camp and later earned the Thomas Wilkins Young Artist of Tomorrow Award, named for the then conductor-in-residence at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
Valentine remembers this vividly, recalling he moment Mitchell-Matthews and another student, both members of DSA’s Vision Male Ensemble, sang for Wilkins in competition for the honor. “Look,” she recalls Wilkins saying to the students. “You have wonderful voices. You have wonderful training. Do me a favor and get your grades together.”
Mitchell-Matthews took the advice, but college wasn’t a priority. Instead, he emailed Elizabeth Anderson, Detroit Opera’s production coordinator, and pitched himself, writing that after graduation, he could be the young local talent they built up. Mitchell-Matthews remembers her immediate reply: “That’s a wonderful idea, but, young man, go to college. We’ll be here.”
Though disappointed, he would later recognize this as a redirection, not a rejection. Mitchell-Matthews went his own way, briefly pursuing a military path in North Carolina before returning to Michigan and enrolling in courses at Schoolcraft College. Between classes, he won his first Detroit Opera role as, in his words, “a super” — carrying The Mikado on stage in the opera’s 2010 production.
In opera, a super, or supernumerary, is a nonspeaking role. These roles do not involve singing. Rather, a super stays in the background as an extra would in a film.
Anderson’s words and Wilkins’s encouragement reverberated in Mitchell-Matthews’s mind, and in 2011, he entered Indiana University’s voice and opera program. Opportunities flowed, and soon he was performing in Italy with the Ezio Pinza Council for American Singers of Opera, landing among the top three in the National Collegiate American Spirituals Summit and Voice Competition, and performing with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
With the spark for education lit, opera graduate studies at Southern Methodist University followed. By 2018, Mitchell-Matthews was building both a professional career and a family, navigating a balance of fatherhood, office jobs, and his singing career. The latter he cultivated with a spot in the Detroit Opera Touring Ensemble and sessions with his vocal coach, Detroit-born George Shirley, the first African American tenor to hold a lead singing role with the Metropolitan Opera.
That balance was tested profoundly in 2024, when his wife passed away. Suddenly a single father to two young children, now 3 and 5, Mitchell-Matthews leaned into both parenthood and music.
“I see them light up when I sing and when I’m sharing musical history,” he says. “They’re my inspiration.”
As he prepared to step into the spotlight at Detroit Opera, Mitchell-Matthews reflected not on grief but on gratitude.
“I’ve been through a lot in life,” he says. “And I’m just so grateful for this moment.”
This story originally appeared in the February 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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