At last! We will finally get to hear the "microphone between the tits." Anna Netrebko, who kicked off her career in the US here in '96 (in Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila), will be back in La Traviata, claims the SF Opera who announced the new season today.

You'll want to see other, um, microphones, too, when the provocative Angela Gheorghiu, who we were so smitten with in La Rondine, comes back for more Puccini via La Boheme. It seems that it's the 150th anniversary Puccini's birth this year, we're getting two operas by him (with Tosca being the other.)

A wee bit tame, we say, since you typically get two operas by Puccini in any season. Take, for example, La Rondine and Madama Butterfly. A true anniversary celebration would be to showcase all of Puccini's works, or even better, how about eleven different productions of Butterfly? Short of that, you're just screwing the Pooch-ini.

Picture of Anna Netrebko courtesy of SF Opera. More after the jump.

Then again, if it was non-stop Puccini, we would not see the world premiere of The Bonesetter's Daughter, with a libretto by San Francisco's Amy Tan and music by Stewart Wallace. Or, say, the West Coast premiere of Jack Heggie's Three Decembers (Last Acts) (which premieres next month in Houston.) You would not get to see Korngold's Die tote Stadt, a 1920s opera never shown on this stage yet. Or the nice microphone of Inva Mula (nice name for an Austin Powers villain, yes?) in the Elixir of Love.

While we don't want to know where they hide their mikes, Dmitri Hvorostovsky (who opens the season in Simon Boccanegra) and Samuel Ramey (as Boris Godunov) are not too shabby either.

The last season of Donald Runnicles as Music Director, he'll conduct four operas. His successor at the baton after this season, Nicola Luisotti, will give us a taste of his skillz as he conducts La Boheme. Runnicles, who has been in his position since 1992, will be celebrated with a performance of the Verdi Requiem. But hey, he's not dead! Why could you not give him a good old star-studded gala, like Lofti Mansouri got? Runnicles will actually will become the chief conductor at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in his native land, and the next general music director at the Deutsch Oper Berlin. If we were Poland, we'd be concerned that Germans would appoint a Wagner specialists to lead their Berlin opera. We'll make sure to give Runnicles a warm farewell, even though he'll be back regularly for the Ring cycle and other operas, as he has been one of the consistent bright points of the SF Opera.

We'll leave you with an excerpt from Die tote Stadt. Enjoy!