The channel was launched at 6:30 PM, September 25, 2006 the opening night of the Met season. The first broadcast was a live performance of Puccini’sMadama Butterfly, conducted by James Levine, the Met's Music Director at the time, and directed by Anthony Minghella. It starred Chilean soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domâs as Cio-Cio-San, tenor Marcello Giordani as Pinkerton, and baritone Dwayne Croft as Sharpless. Metropolitan Opera Radio replaced the existing "Classical Voices" channel in the Sirius channel lineup. While opera-oriented, the "Classical Voices" channel also offered some choral music and art songs programming. The new channel was launched as part of new Met general manager Peter Gelb's initiative to utilize technology to make the Met's performances more accessible to a wide audience. The channel was added to the XM lineup on November 12, 2008, as part of the merger between Sirius and XM. Two to three live broadcasts of operas from the Met are presented each week of the Met's performing season. The performances are hosted by Mary Jo Heath with commentator William Berger. During intermissions live interviews with performers and other opera professionals and experts are interspersed with background information and informal chat by the co-hosts. During the rest of the broadcast week, many of the Met's historic archived broadcast tapes are presented. These have been collected and re-mastered by the Met's sound archive department. When presented on Sirius, the original commentaries are replaced by introductions, which include short stories on principal performers and synopsis of each act, recorded by Margaret Juntwait. Of the Met's approximately 1500 archived broadcasts, Sirius's Met Opera Radio presented over 570 in its first three years. Each day up to seven full length archived broadcasts are presented, starting at 6:00 AM. The channel's weekly schedule includes approximately 12 or 13 different archive recordings which are broadcast in rotation at different starting times. These broadcasts are then repeated with time-span ranging from few months to well over a year. In between the complete operas, shorter pieces of studio-recorded vocal music are presented. None of these is ever interrupted except to accommodate the start of a live broadcast. Sirius also provides the sound transmission for the Metropolitan Opera's live high-definition video opera presentations in movie theatersworld wide. The traditional Metropolitan Opera Radio Network Saturday broadcasts are also presented on Sirius's Met Opera channel.
