photo credit: Rose Callahan / Metropolitan Opera

Thrilling audiences with more than 200 performances each season, the MET Orchestra is one of the world’s great performing ensembles, both on stage and in the opera pit. Since its founding in 1883, the MET Orchestra’s performances have encompassed not only the entire opera repertoire, but symphonic and chamber programs at Carnegie Hall, international tours, and countless musician activities outside of the Metropolitan Opera House. The MET Orchestra has grown in the past four decades into an ensemble noted by singers, critics, conductors, and audiences as one of today’s most stylistically versatile and musically satisfying orchestras.

MET Orchestra Musicians are chosen through a rigorous blind audition process. Auditions routinely draw upwards of two hundred applicants for a single position, due to the quality and status of the MET Orchestra and the particular audition procedures that make the MET Orchestra’s auditions arguably the fairest in the industry. MET Orchestra Musicians were educated at the finest colleges and conservatories around the country and world, from the Conservatoire de Paris to Harvard University, Oberlin College to The Juilliard School.

Members of the MET Orchestra are much sought-after teachers, comprising large portions of the music faculties of all the major universities and conservatories in the New York metropolitan area. Former students of MET Orchestra Musicians can be found in virtually every performing arts organization in the country. In addition, a number of MET Orchestra Musicians dedicate time to working with younger students, both privately and by assuming leading roles in youth orchestras and pre-college programs.

Individual members of the orchestra have traveled to all corners of the Earth, in equal parts performing and engaging underserved audiences. MET Orchestra Musicians have recently performed fundraisers for local public schools, taught in Haiti and elsewhere in Central America, and brought South African students to New York for intensive study. In addition, MET Orchestra Musicians are coaches and teachers at some of the world’s leading summer music festivals, including the Verbier Festival, where the coaching faculty has been comprised of MET Orchestra Musicians since its founding in 2000.

The MET Orchestra Musicians are dedicated to providing their fans with a more beautiful and immersive experience of opera, in equal parts engaging audiences in behind-the-scenes activities and opening an unprecedented channel of communication between performer and listener. Please comment liberally, tweet at us, and click here to offer your feedback, suggestions, and questions. We want to hear from you!