Jason Victor Serinus

Patricia Racette, Mark Delavan, and Brian Jagde swept the War Memorial Opera House stage clean with a powerhouse performance of Tosca, offering audiences a pack of principals that might be the most engaging around.

Anyone who doesn’t yet know that Kansas-bred former Merolina Joyce DiDonato is a treasurable and highly versatile artist can join her throngs of devotees for “Drama Queens”.

After diva Angela Gheorghiu is stricken with terrible nausea and intestinal flu, SFO favorite Melody Moore steps in after Act 1 to make her role debut as Tosca in a production otherwise wanting for drama.

On his second solo album for British label Avie, Still Falls the Rain, American tenor Nicholas Phan again turns to the music of Benjamin Britten.

There were many beautiful moments in Kate Royal’s recital, some offered unqualified success, others made clear that are still lessons to be learned.

A feast of operatic traditions is served up by top-flight musicians from many cultures, in a rare and hopeful collaboration.

Soprano Patricia Racette digs deep to describe her vision of the juicy, neurotic, “over-the-top” Tosca.

The second mainstay opera of SFO’s season to feature equally strong alternating casts, this Tosca, thanks to the company’s shrewd General Director David Gockley, gives us the dueling divas Angela Gheorghiu and Patricia Racette. 

Esa-Pekka Salonen, the composer/conductor who until recent years led the Los Angeles Philharmonic, brings to the Pacific shore the same Philharmonia Orchestra whose many recordings with some of the greatest conductors of the latter 20th century have achieved legendary status.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin and a superb cast prove we can never have too many recordings of Don Giovanni.