Admin

Organization

Masada Festival

Singer

Soprano

Svetla Vassileva

Floria Tosca

Tenor

Gustavo Porta

Mario Cavaradossi

Baritone

Scott Hendricks

Baron Scarpia

Sergey Murzaev

Vladimir Braun

The sacristan

Bass

Carlo Striuli

Cesare Angelotti

Joseph Aridan

Spoletta

Oded Reich

Sciarrone

Noah Briger

A jailer

Child vocalist

Anat Czarny

A shepherd

Conductor

Daniel Oren

Stage director

Nicolas Joël

Costume designer

Katia Duflot

Set designer

Emmanuelle Favre

Israeli Opera

Orchestra

The Israel Symphony Orchestra Rishon LeZion

Others

The Israeli Opera Chorus

Tosca

Masada

Israel

Open Air

Tosca comes alive in the open air of Israel’s Negev Desert, staged at the foot of the towering fortress of Masada. Starring Svetla Vassileva as the title heroine, Gustavo Porta as her beloved Cavaradossi, and Sergey Murzaev as the evil police chief, former Paris Opera Director Nicolas Joel’s 2015 production—captured here in 4K (ultra HD)!—reimagined Puccini’s resplendent opera on a breathtaking scale.

An extravagant diva and her high-minded artist-lover face off against Rome’s power-hungry chief of police and his thugs, with a conquering Napoleonic army coming ever nearer… if any literary tale was made for opera, it is Victorien Sardou’s 1887 melodrama La Tosca! After seeing the play on its Italian tour, Puccini decided to turn the work into an opera, enlisting the help of librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. The masterpiece they produced together received an initially lukewarm reaction from music critics: a bad premiere performance and the shocking verismo plot did not help. But audiences proved captivated by the opera's dramatic force, and ultimately assured Tosca’s place in the public imagination as one of the most emblematic works of the operatic genre.

Production booklet

Further reading