The Opera Leaves the Metro Area. Ángel Ramos Foundation Backs the Olga Iglesias Project for a Third Consecutive Year

San Juan, Puerto Rico – The Ángel Ramos Foundation has awarded the Olga Iglesias Project (OIP) a $14,000 grant, announced September 24, 2026, its third consecutive award through the foundation's Inversión 360º program. The funds support "Del Salón de Clase a la Ópera", a cultural circuit that will bring the Project's educational recitals and a staged production of La Batalla de los Clásicos to school communities outside the San Juan metro area during the 2026–2027 season.

It is the first time the Project takes the opera beyond the metro area. In earlier cycles, schools across the island asked for the recitals, but the cost of moving artists, a pianist, and props to distant towns left many unserved. This grant covers that logistics. The tour will run in partnership with Ponce Lírico, the lyric arts organization led by tenor Alfredo Martirena, a Fellow of the Project since 2024, which opens the schools of Ponce and the southern region to OIP.

It is the third time in three years that the foundation has placed its bet on the Project. In 2024, $10,000 carried La Batalla de los Clásicos, OIP's first commissioned opera, to its world premiere. In 2025, $15,000 carried the work, now orchestrated, to ten school recitals and to its culmination at Teatro Francisco Arriví before students from six schools. With this grant, the foundation's investment in the Project totals $39,000 over three years.

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"Three years in a row is no longer a grant, it is a relationship. The Ángel Ramos Foundation watched us commission an opera, watched us orchestrate it and take it into San Juan's schools, and now helps us take it where it has never been. A student in Ponce or Utuado has the same right to this music as one in Santurce. That is what this grant pays for."

Anthony Cheney Guzmán, Founder and Executive Director of OIP

The recitals follow the Project's proven formats, "Our Voices" for intermediate and upper grades and "Who Wants to Be the Next Opera Superstar?" for elementary, with OIP's professional singers and a live pianist. The staged production of La Batalla de los Clásicos, music by Johanny Navarro and libretto by Paloma Sierra, brings the stage closer to students for whom a performance in a theater is not an everyday occasion. Every activity will be evaluated with surveys before and after, as in previous cycles. Dates and schools will be announced as they are confirmed.