Opera Australia enters its 60th season next year as the world's best-selling opera company, according to artistic director Lyndon Terracini.
He said the company had established itself as one of the world's leading opera companies, comparable to the New York Met and London's Covent Garden. 
For 2015, it has already sold 649,000 tickets, "more than anyone else in the world," he said.
Mr Terracini said OA is the country's largest and busiest arts company, giving work to more than 1000 people: singers, instrumentalists, production staff, carpenters, tailors, sewers, wig-makers, painters, writers, ticket sellers and administrators.
More importantly, it is attracting top-calibre singers.
A return of Wagner's Ring - a colossal production and colossal success in 2013 - and a glamorous new production of Verdi's Luisa Miller headline OA's Melbourne season in 2016, along with Bizet's Pearlfishers and Puccini's La Boheme.
Mr Terracini said Luisa Miller contains beautiful music, especially a tenor aria made famous by Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. It is the perfect vehicle for Nicole Car, the young Melbourne soprano who has broken through at the top level - including Covent Garden - after superb performances as Tatiana (Eugene Onegin) and Elvira (Don Giovanni)
"Nicole is the first singer I ever hired in Melbourne. She has a genuinely beautiful voice, a natural stage presence, is very musical and constantly willing to learn," he said.
Luisa Miller is a grand tragedy, with elements of both La Traviata in the vulnerable heroine and Don Carlos in its big duet for two basses. The production is directed by Giancarlo del Monaco with Verdi specialist Andrea Licata conducting.
Australian playwright Michael Gow directs a new production of The Pearlfishers, a story of doomed love in ancient Ceylon, after extensive research with set and costume designer Robert Kemp in India and Sri Lanka. Australian soprano Emma Matthews sings Leila, popular baritone Jose Carbo is Zurga, and young Russian tenor Dmitry Korchak is Nadir.
Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, who stepped in late in proceedings in 2013 to conduct a triumphant Ring, will take the baton again in   November-  December. Stefan Vinke, inexperienced but superb in the 2013 Melbourne Ring, has become the greatest Siegfried alive, according to Mr Terracini, and is in demand at Bayreuth and around the world.
There will be a new Brunhilde, Lise Lindstrom, who triumphed in Sydney as Turandot, and a new Wotan in Greer Grimsley.