Puccini's masterful melodrama is a sexually charged, edge-of-your-seat thriller, in which a great singer, a rebellious painter and a corrupt police chief engage in a deadly test of wills. Music director Nicola Luisotti, "one of his generation's most accomplished Puccini conductors" (Opera News), leads two astonishing casts.

One stars Angela Gheorghiu, "in a part she seems to have been born to play" (Opera Today) and "who, like Tosca, is a born diva" (The Independent, London); Massimo Giordano, praised by The New York Times for his "ardent, expressive singing;" and veteran baritone Roberto Frontali, who brought "vocal brass and weight" (The Dallas Morning News) to San Francisco Opera's The Girl of the Golden West (2010).

The next cast stars Patricia Racette, who "tapped into Tosca's combination of regal and all-too-human traits and backed up her vibrant characterization with singing of considerable expressive fire" (Opera News); tenor Brian Jagde, lauded for his "beautiful singing, now nuanced, now ringing and forceful" (Washington Post); and Mark Delavan (Wotan in the Ring cycle, 2011), a singer of "ferocious power" (San Francisco Chronicle).