When the Metropolitan Opera's 2012 Beverly Sills Artist Angela Meade starred in the company's recent production of Ernani, she gave "a true star-making Met performance" (WQXR) that "showed what this uncommonly gifted rising artist is capable of" (Anthony Tommasini, New York Times). In May the soprano tackles another Verdi heroine, making her Deutsche Oper Berlin debut as Lucrezia in two concert performances of I due Foscari. More high-profile "firsts" follow in August when Meade makes a trio of major U.S. music festival debuts, headlining "A Night at the Opera" with the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival; "Italian Opera Night" with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Saratoga, and Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand" with Robert Spano in Aspen. In June -- as a preview of next season's debut with Washington National Opera -- she portrays the title role of Bellini's Norma in concert at Oregon's Astoria Music Festival, and in July she sings Leonora in Verdi's Il trovatore at the Festival Castell de Peralada in Spain. As the New York Daily News recently remarked, this gifted young soprano is truly "on the fast track to stardom."