Aria Code, the Rhiannon Giddens–hosted podcast series presented by The Metropolitan Opera and WQXR, New York's classical music station, returns for its third season today. The new season will be more expansive than the previous two, with a total of eighteen new episodes released bi-weekly, covering a range of music, artists, and voices.

For the first episode of the new season, focused on Puccini's final opera, Turandot, and its famous aria “Nessun dorma," Giddens gets some insight on the triumphant piece from conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal; writer Anne Midgette, the former classical music critic for the Washington Post; and Dr. Michael Cho, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who has been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic and is a violist with the Longwood Symphony Orchestra and the National Virtual Medical Orchestra. You can hear the episode below, and watch a virtual performance of "Nessun Dorma" made by 700 children in April 2020, from Europa InCanto, which is referenced in the podcast:

Rhiannon Giddens' new album, They’re Calling Me Home, due April 9 (on vinyl June 11), was recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi during the COVID-19 lockdown in Ireland. The two expats found themselves drawn to and comforted by the music of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland, which they recorded at a spare studio on a working farm outside of Dublin. The result is a twelve-song album that speaks to the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical call "home" of death. You can pre-order the album and hear two songs from it here.