Anna Netrebko

She sang at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, she's been featured in magazines from 'Vogue' to 'Vanity Fair', she's been nominated for Grammys and won BRIT Awards, she's performed many of the great operas from 'Aida' to 'La Boheme', she's one of the few opera singers to impact on mainstream media, sung at most of the world's most prestigious opera theatres and she is universally recognised as one of the greatest soprano of her day.

Born in Krasnodar, Russia in 1971, Anna Netrebko studied at St Petersburg Conservatory and subsequently won the prestigious Glinka Competition in Moscow in 1993, getting her first major starring role the following year as Susanna in Mozart's 'Le Nozze' at the Kirov Opera. Her fame rocketed following a sensational appearance as Lyudmila at the San Francisco Opera in 1995 and she went on to make an acclaimed debut at London's Covent Garden in 2000. After an appearance at Los Angeles Opera in 2003 she was hailed as the new Maria Callas and gained even greater fame, making inroads into the mainstream market with a series of successful recordings of Mozart, Verdi, Prokofiev and Puccini. Her 'Duets' CD with Roland Villazon even broke into the pop charts in various European countries and she became a regular on American chat shows and sang with Andrea Bocelli.

The problems associated with Russians getting visas to perform abroad persuaded Netrebko to seek Austrian citizenship, which she gained in 2006. In 2015 she married the Azerbaijani tenor Yusif Eyvazov, whom she met when they performed together in Rome and in 2008 she was awarded Russia's highest award for the arts, the Russian State Prize in 2008 and, widely acclaimed as the greatest prima donna of her day, she also became a passionate campaigner for children's welfare.

In 2017 she gave her voice to the roles of Elsa in Wagner's 'Lohengrin', Leonora in Verdi's 'The Force of Destiny' and the title role in Verdi's 'Aida'.