Founded by Boris Pokrovsky in 1972, this small theatre has built a devoted following by staging operas that the big houses ignore. The repertoire skips the warhorses in favour of rarely performed works by well-known composers -- Shostakovich's "The Nose," Salieri's "First the Music, Then the Words," and rediscovered Baroque pieces that would otherwise gather dust.
The intimate scale means you're close to the performers, and the productions tend toward the inventive and experimental. Pokrovsky, who also directed at the Bolshoi for decades, used this theatre as a laboratory for ideas too bold for the main stage. It remains a favourite among Moscow's serious opera-goers.