According to critics, lyric-dramatic soprano Zarina Abaeva is one of the most outstanding artists of her generation. Since 2012 she has been a soloist of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre and since 2019 a guest soloist of the Moscow Novaya Opera Theatre. She performed at such venues as the Paris Philharmonic, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Cologne Philharmonie, as well as at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Milan, where a television broadcast was recorded for the Mezzo and Medici TV channels. In the same year, Zarina was invited to the Lucerne Festival and the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Later, she brilliantly performed with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Berlin and made her debut in New York and Tokyo. Among the bright productions with Zarina Abaeva there are Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (as the Virgin Mary), Puccini’s La Bohème (as Mimi) in Baden-Baden, and Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (as Antonia). She has performed under the musical direction of such outstanding conductors as Teodor Currentzis, Mikhail Pletnev, Antonio Pirolli, Pavel Kogan, Valentin Uryupin, Andres Mustonen, Michiyoshi Inoue, Daniel Oren, and Graeme Jenkins. Zarina’s repertoire includes such roles as Butterfly (Madame Butterfly), Mimi (La Bohème), Aida (Aida), Michaela (Carmen), Tatiana (Eugene Onegin), Iolanta (Iolanta), Maria (Mazeppa), Katya (The Passenger), Blanche (Dialogues of the Carmelites), Gorislava (Ruslan and Lyudmila), Ninetta (Love for Three Oranges), Antonia (The Tales of Hoffmann), Soprano in Verdi’s Requiem, Soprano in Stabat mater by Rossini, Soprano in Te Deum by Bruckner, Soprano in Symphony No. 14 by Shostakovich. This season Zarina sang the Butterfly part in Madame Butterfly at the Opera House of Bologna under the baton of Daniel Oren. In the spring of 2023, she made her debut with great success in the role of Desdemona in Otello at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Theatre under the direction of Maestro Zubin Mehta. This is her first appearance with the IPO.