Thrilled to Announce

On today's episode, we are THRILLED and HONORED to chat with the star 1-of-1 soprano Ariadne Greif! She has premiered over 100 new works all around the world with the coolest of the cool in classical music. We pick her brain about her early internet memories, social media posting theory, the gameification of auditioning, and feeling envy. AND all of her cool performing. AND all of her cool clo...

Welcome to Classical Music Social Media Anthropology 101. Please take out your syllabus and have a seat. We take a magnifying glass, and microscope, a thoughtful gaze and point it to the strange, silly, and occasionally harrowing landscape of opera singer Instagram. Do we create our internet content, or does our internet content create us? What will we find in our search for truth in the quagmire...

We dissect the idea of a fixed, unchanging past and futures colored by the deaths we experience through Handel arias, Lynch's death, Yuval Sharon's 'A New Philosophy of Opera', Nosferatu 2024, the anniversary of Perri's father's death, 'Die Wise' by Stephen Jenkinson, and the opera singer who sang at the inauguration.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!! In this episode we discuss: - Being maximalists - Braiding our hair - This Peter Gelb op-ed - This Alex Ross article - This it girl article - The operatic it girl (does she exist) - Opera sounds alien and weird, let's lean in - SO MUCH MORE!

Is opera cringe? Are you cringe? Let's find out together :) Charlotte & Perri discuss the cringe inherent in performance through the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jia Tolentino, and their own little brains! They share stories, compare notes, and commune with cringe. The only way out is through - let's have a seance with uncomfortable emotions.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!! A few weeks ago we asked you guys to tell us all about your paranormal operatic experiences, and this episode is full of those stories!!! Haunted homestays, ghost cats who hate singing, vengeful on-stage spirits, prophetic pre-audition dreams, and MORE!!  We’re all haunted by specters of singers past, possessed by them every time we steal ornaments from old recordings… this ar...

Sylvia's Don Giovanni review!! We are SO excited to share our convo with THEE Sylvia Korman!! They are an opera critic for Parterre Box , owner of @peoplemadatopera on twitter, and a phd student genius!! We followed Sylvia to the met’s production of don Giovanni like two little puppy dogs to get an inside look at the critic’s PROCESS: what are they thinking about when they sit down to watch a...

Welcome to our MET COMPETITION EPISODE!!!! We snuck our gigantic microphones into the metropolitan opera HOUSE to chit chat with friends old and new, share our observations, and read poems to each other lol. We mediate on loss, growth, and bearing witness to joy. We had a lot of fun free associating, connecting our favorite thinkers and tarot card archetypes to our emotional landscapes. How can we...

We giggle at the bad reviews we’ve gotten over the years and read some of the haunting reviews you all sent us on insta. Then we start to flesh out a theory about fluctuating and flexible identity, both in rehearsal and in life. It’s so deliciously easy to form our self-understanding around a stiff and rigid self-concept… what changes when we soften our idea of ourselves?  THEN, in a new segm...

Hi everyone :) we are so thrilled and pumped to share our gorgeous convo w James aka hausofshmizzay on instagram. We connected close to a year ago and met irl this past fall. We’ve wanted to have them on the pod for a long long time, and we’re so excited that we finally made it happen. For those few who may not know James, they have blown up over the past year because of their posts detailing in d...

WE’RE BACK BABIES!!!! Strap in, hunker down, pack a snack, because this one is a doozy. This magnum opus of an episode is the beginning of a gigantic exploration process for us. What started as a simple question (‘what would our dream rehearsal process look like?’) turned into a beautiful, twisty-turny, unanswerable labyrinth of interwoven thread. What would it feel like to have the genuine opport...

NEW EP ALERT!!!!!!! We are so excited to share this awesome convo we had with a couple of members of the Black Opera Alliance Leadership Council. Zyda Culpepper reached out to us earlier this year to acknowledge our previous BOA episode and to suggest that the next time we talk about the org, we have some members on the pod. She was totally right and this convo blossomed and bloomed. We discussed...

CHITCHAT ALERT! We really really love this cozy, autumnal, juicy convo. Charlotte goes deep into Mercury retrograde and its effects on the Chautauqua situation we covered, Perri gets sidetracked and summarizes a weird article she read about Tiktok and the VOICE as the SOUL, and we both explore what this fall audition season means to us. Our approaches, our anxieties, the dialectic between ‘I love...

Hello dearest sweetie little friends! We’re back with this month’s ~*~Patreon teaser mini-ep~*~. We have the LITERAL international Superstar Blake Jennings, who you know as @jakeblennings on Tik Tok. Last time we had him on for our YAP pt. 1 ep he was at 120k followers, now he’s at 540k (!) Literally cannot compute that number. We laugh and giggle and smile about Kpop’s similarities to the opera w...

Like many of you, we were pretty taken aback when we heard through a leaked email that Chautauqua Opera hired former young artists to judge their 2022 prescreen applications. We emailed Steve Osgood asking for a statement, and he ended up coming on the ol pod! We expressed our concerns and the concerns of the young artist community, and he answered. It was a pretty fulfilling convo and we’re excit...

When we were planning our patreon and our next steps for this fall season of our podcast / our lives, we realized that we want Thrilled to Announce to grow into a collective of radical operatic voices. We want this podcast to be a movement, a dreamspace, a home for creation, brainstorming, and the rebirth of the classical music world. With that in mind, we wanted our next steps to involve more tha...

Oh HEY! Welcome to a gigantic honking episode. What started as an episode about The Time Perri Broke Her Voice very quickly transformed into a manifesto on decolonizing our relationship with our bodies and remembering lost knowledge.  From René Descartes to Resmaa Menakem, Charlotte traces the mind-body problem through the ages and connects it to why Perri had such a hard time singing in the...

OMG hi we love this lil chit chat!!! The perf balance of the Big Three: ~~~Current Opera Events~~~Skincare~~~Theory~~~ ! Pls consider going to our link in bio to sign the petition to support the demands of Eastman’s Black Student Union in supporting Jahshanti Henry! He was racially profiled by a public safety officer at his own school! He’s a flute STAR and we want to support him in this moment &l...

Hello sweet and beautiful friends : ) we decided to spend this week’s Chitchat chitchatting about Black Opera Alliance. They’ve been working tirelessly on the Pledge for Racial Equity and Systemic Change in Opera, including the recent release of the first Insight Report tracking the progress of US Opera Companies in acknowledging, signing, and committing to the pledge! We spend this episode talkin...

Guys… we have…. A new…. Idea! And it’s now Aries season so we Immediately Did It. We are going to start doing teeny tiny mini episodes ~interspersed~ between our longer essay-style Bad Boys. As horse_ebooks famously tweeted back in 2012, “everything happens so much”. We wanted a format where we could talk about all the wild shit that happens in the opera world and discuss the Hot News Items you se...

Hi everyone, guess what : ) we recorded an episode of our podcast : ) welcome to SEASON TWO BABY!!!! In honor of Valentine’s day, we discuss a very special type of love on today’s ep.. the love between friends : ) Your intrepid hosts discuss the unique temporal experience of friendships in opera, the duality of the Young Artist Experience, and the importance of holding contradicting truths in your...

Hey cutie.. We’re bringing you a two part series on the history of YAPs and the YAP system’s exploitation of our l a b o r and sanity. In this first ep, we share some of our stories from YAPs and ‘Pay To Sings’, and we listen to many of the stories you sent in. We brought on our favorite decorated YAP Veteran @jakeblennings to break these down with us. We want to create a space where we can all op...

Helloooo reporting live from Paxton’s universe~*~*  She’s a SINGER she’s an ANARCHO-SYNDICALIST she’s a BRUNETTE. As our very first guest, shes coming to remind us that we deserve community, a livelihood as artists, and art that is empowering to both the artists and community!! It’s just what you deserve, baby! We’re getting into:  * Paxton’s experience protesting consistently for the pa...

Hello??? Hi! It’s us! We’re Thrilled 2 Announce that you all submitted so many fun questions for us to answer!! (Both the questions directed to us & musings on life in general.) Because we can’t shut the F word up, we edited it down to a 57 min lil chat because we are Good Samaritans. (The original recording was 2.5 hours???? Because we answered every q cause we love u all!! Face it!!) We have...

Ep 4 is out! We’re getting into identity, shapeshifting, and evolving as little avatars in this world (and the opera world!) How can we remind ourselves that we’re not stagnant, but constantly growing, adapting, and full of infinite possibility? Do we sound like we’re on shrooms? We’re making connections between Heidegger, @sighswoon, and Minecraft! (?!) Come listen to us think about how to not be...