Anna Netrebko (Biography)

Anna Netrebko is no longer just the darling of the opera world: she is enchanting audiences around the globe while continuing to cultivate the respect and admiration of opera’s most devoted and demanding fans. Her beautiful, dark, and distinctive voice, together with her elegant and alluring stage presence, have prompted critics to hail the Russian soprano as “Audrey Hepburn with a voice,” and “a singer who simply has it all: a voice of astounding purity, precision, and scope, extensive dynamic and tonal range, imagination, insight, and wit – all combined with a dazzling charisma that makes it all but impossible to look away when she is performing.

Since her triumphant Salzburg Festival debut in 2002 as Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Anna Netrebko has gone on to appear with nearly all of the world’s great opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, London’s Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opera, the Berlin State Opera, and Munich’s Bavarian State Opera. She also frequently returns to the Kirov Opera at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg (where she began by cleaning the floors during her conservatory days and later, in 1994, made her stage debut as Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro) to collaborate with her longtime mentor, conductor Valery Gergiev.

Anna Netrebko made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 2002 as Natasha in Prokofiev’s War and Peace, a role she has also sung at London’s Covent Garden, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, and Madrid’s Teatro Real. Ms. Netrebko’s other signature roles include Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème; Giulietta in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Elvira in his I puritani, and Amina in his La sonnambula; Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Susanna in his Nozze di Figaro; Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, Adina in his L’elisir d’amore, and the title role in his Lucia di Lammermoor; the title role in Massenet’s Manon; Juliette in Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette; and Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata.