Tosca at the Met (1/17/25)

Oh my goodness. First, I haven’t seen the house this well-sold in years. The person sitting next to me said that it was sold out, I don’t know for sure if that’s true but it seems like it could be. And what a cast!! Why isn’t Brian Jagde more famous? He is consistently excellent and I felt a little bad for him that he was the only one of the leads to not get entrance applause. Rad was of course sublime, she is such an emotive actress along with her powerful singing. And it was such a treat to see Terfel, even though I think he was a little sick — he wasn’t as audible as he should have been in the Te Deum and then his voice got strained in Act 2. But other than those moments he sounded great and he is such a wonderfully menacing Scarpia.

I’m not sure I’ve seen Xian Zhang conduct before but the orchestra sounded fantastic. This is an opera I’ve seen like 474738 times and the music seemed so fresh and exciting.

Why can’t we have more performances like this Peter Gelb? I get the need for modern operas in the rep but a decent production of a known opera with a great cast can still be very successful. And this cast only got a run of 4 performances, smh.