Anna Netrebko | Biography

Anna Netrebko launched her career over twenty-five years ago and signed with Deutsche Grammophon in the early 2000s. Anna Netrebko – Opera Arias, her debut DG album (2003), included such repertoire as Mozart’s “Padre, germani, addio!” from Idomeneo and Dvořák’s “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka. It was followed by Sempre libera, Russian Album and complete recordings of Le nozze di Figaro and La bohème. Other albums from her first decade as a DG artist include Souvenirs, In the Still of Night, Anna Netrebko: Live at the Metropolitan Opera and recordings of La traviata, I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater.

Netrebko’s DG discography grew with DVD/Blu-ray releases of La traviata, Le nozze di Figaro, I puritani, Manon, Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pasquale and Anna Bolena, together with a DVD of music videos: Anna Netrebko: The Woman, The Voice. She returned to the studio in 2013 to record Verdi, an album of solo arias, and showed her affinity for the Romantic repertoire with full recordings of Eugene Onegin, Giovanna d’Arco and Il trovatore. Other releases include Duets, with Rolando Villazón; Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs (2014), with Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Staatskapelle; Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta (January 2015); Macbeth from New York’s Metropolitan Opera (October 2015); Don Giovanni from La Scala, Milan (November 2015); Manon Lescaut, recorded live at the Salzburg Festival (December 2016); and Romanza, made with her husband Yusif Eyvazov (September 2017).

In recent seasons she has taken on heavier, more complex operatic roles, such as Turandot, Tosca and Elsa (Lohengrin). The rich, darker tones of Anna Netrebko’s voice today can be heard in the Grammy-nominated album Verismo (September 2016), made with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and Sir Antonio Pappano and featuring extracts from, among others, Madama Butterfly, Tosca, Manon Lescaut, Adriana Lecouvreur and Andrea Chénier. Amata dalle tenebre, Netrebko’s first classical solo album for five years, was recorded at La Scala with the Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala and its Music Director Riccardo Chailly, and was released in November 2021.

Netrebko made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 2002 and has performed twenty-two roles on its famous stage as well as appearing in fifteen of its “Live in HD” transmissions to cinemas worldwide. As a long-term resident in Vienna, granted Austrian citizenship in 2006, she has appeared each season at the Vienna State Opera and has also been a frequent guest artist at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, La Scala and the Bavarian State Opera, where she made her role debuts as Lady Macbeth in 2014 and Turandot in 2020.

Netrebko made her stage debut as Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco in the opening production of La Scala’s 2015–16 season – the work’s first performance there since the mid−1860s; her role debut as Elsa at Dresden’s Semperoper in 2016 (released the following year as Deutsche Grammophon’s first Ultra HD 4K opera recording); and further role debuts as Aida at the Salzburg Festival (2017), Maddalena (Andrea Chénier) at La Scala (2017), Tosca at the Met (2018), Leonora (La forza del destino) at Covent Garden (2019) and Elisabetta (Don Carlo) at the Bolshoi (2020).

Born in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar in 1971, Anna Netrebko began singing at an early age. She later studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory, which led to her being cast in a series of small roles at the Mariinsky. At the age of twenty-two she made her role debut there as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro and was subsequently engaged as part of the theatre’s ensemble company.

Netrebko’s St Petersburg years set firm foundations of technique and stage experience. She went on to make her debut in the United States at San Francisco Opera in 1995, joined its Merola Opera Program the following year and was soon singing at the world’s leading opera houses on tour with her Mariinsky colleagues and increasingly as a guest artist. Her performance as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni at the 2002 Salzburg Festival secured her place among the top league of young singers. Since then she has performed with nearly all the world’s great opera companies, in roles which, as well as those already mentioned, include Puccini’s Mimì (La bohème); Verdi’s Violetta (La traviata) and Gilda (Rigoletto); Bellini’s Giulietta (I Capuleti e i Montecchi), Elvira (I puritani) and Amina (La sonnambula); Donizetti’s Norina (Don Pasquale), Adina (L’elisir d’amore), Lucia di Lammermoor and Anna Bolena; Massenet’s Manon; Gounod’s Juliette; and Tchaikovsky’s Tatiana (Eugene Onegin) and Iolanta.

4/2022